Uncredited and Iconic: Mirthes Bernardes and the Urban Footprint

In an age obsessed with attribution—of tagging, reposting, branding—it’s shocking how many women remain untagged in the history of design.

Bringing these names to light isn’t an act of nostalgia or symbolic inclusion. It’s historical repair. The systems we move through—urban, digital, visual, cultural—were not all built in boardrooms or studios. Many were shaped quietly, expertly, and without credit, by people never invited to sign their work.
This is Episode 2 of a continuing series on those whose authorship shaped our world—and was erased from its story.

Walking on a Forgotten Signature

You don’t need a museum to see the work of Mirthes Bernardes. It’s beneath your feet. From Avenida Paulista to Praça da Sé, from residential sidewalks to tourist arteries, her design—the black-and-white geometric tile pattern known informally as “Piso Paulista”—forms the visual and rhythmic identity of Brazil’s largest city.

Created in 1965, Bernardes’s motif consists of three basic tile types: black, white, and diagonally bisected half-and-half. These simple units combine in a modular system that evokes movement, balance, and contrast. The result is both functional and mesmerizing—a dynamic wave that seems to shimmer as one walks across it.

But the design is not merely decorative. It is a visual abstraction of the map of São Paulo state—a poetic gesture that turns geography into geometry. In doing so, Bernardes offered a vision of urban identity embedded in everyday infrastructure, not monumental architecture.

It’s design as environmental signature—anonymous, continuous, and distinctly modern.

Modularity, Democracy, and the Ground Plane

Mirthes Bernardes was trained as a draughtswoman working for São Paulo’s municipal department. At a time when women in urban planning were nearly invisible, she submitted her sidewalk concept as part of a public competition under Mayor Faria Lima, who was seeking a standardized pavement pattern for the rapidly growing city.

Bernardes’s entry won not because it was flashy—but because it was clever, economical, and scalable.

The brilliance of her design lies in its modularity: with only three tile types, builders could produce infinite configurations. This was perfect for São Paulo, a city undergoing a concrete boom and grappling with uneven budgets and expanding grids. The pattern accommodates uneven slopes and awkward corners while maintaining visual continuity. It is infinitely extensible, adapting to local needs without sacrificing the identity of the whole.

Her approach embodied the ethos of democratic design. This was not branding from above; it was ornament from below—a civic gesture accessible to everyone. The tiles were cheap, durable, and installable by municipal crews. And yet they created an optical effect reminiscent of op-art and modernist abstraction. Bernardes bridged the high formalism of geometric art with the material logic of the street.

In the lineage of Latin American public visual culture, Bernardes sits alongside artists like Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica, who explored participation and perception—but her medium was the pavement, not the gallery.

Cultural Irony: Authorship Erased by the Very City She Defined

Despite her design’s victory in the 1965 competition, Mirthes Bernardes was never formally credited. The city implemented the pattern en masse, but her name was absent from documents, public plaques, and even internal records. Her authorship was reduced to hearsay, resurfacing only decades later through oral testimony and scattered mentions.

The reasons for this erasure are painfully familiar:

• She was a municipal employee, not a famous designer.
• She was a woman in a bureaucratic system dominated by men.
• She wasn’t part of the elite art world or architectural vanguard.
• And her work was “invisible”—built into infrastructure, not set apart.

Unlike logos or buildings, sidewalks rarely get signatures. But that logic becomes hollow when one realizes the symbolic weight of Bernardes’s design. The city wears her pattern like a skin, yet refused to say her name.

She received no royalties, no formal recognition, and no archival presence in Brazil’s design canon. It was only in 2004 that her authorship gained wider notice thanks to an article in Projeto Design. And it wasn’t until 2015 that a staircase in the Pinheiros district—decorated with her motif—was named Escadaria Mirthes Bernardes in her honor. A humble tribute, but a profound one.

Still, her legacy remains unstudied in architecture schools, uncelebrated in urban design conferences, and uncredited in most public records.

She Made a City Walk with Rhythm—and Signed It in Silence

Mirthes Bernardes challenges our assumptions about authorship in the urban fabric. She didn’t brand São Paulo with a logo. She wove identity into the ground plane, into the repetitive motions of daily life—commuting, walking, waiting.

Her design was a kind of tactical urbanism before the term existed. It provided beauty without extravagance, identity without spectacle, and order without hierarchy. In an era where cities now compete for visibility through expensive architectural statements, Bernardes reminds us that true urban design starts at eye level—or even below it.

Her story also reminds us of what’s at stake when we fail to document women’s labor, especially when it is public, collaborative, and infrastructural. Mirthes didn’t just design tiles. She authored a walking experience. A spatial rhythm. A shared visual inheritance.

And still, most people don’t know her name.