The Pinacoteca's origins are inseparable from São Paulo's transformation in the second half of the 19th century. The province had been a backwater until the 1870s, when coffee production and an expanding railway network brought sudden wealth. Immigrants flooded in — Italians, Japanese, Portuguese, Germans — especially after the abolition of slavery in 1888, and the capital accumulated by coffee barons was reinvested in industry, infrastructure, and culture. The Liceu de Artes e Ofícios, founded in 1873, was part of this ambition: a school to train artisans and workers for the growing city. Its monumental headquarters, designed by Ramos de Azevedo and his collaborator Domiciano Rossi, rose next to the Jardim da Luz on land donated by the provincial government in 1896. Three floors, two internal courtyards, imported Riga pine and French ceramics — the building proclaimed that São Paulo intended to be taken seriously.

By the early 1990s, the Pinacoteca needed reinvention. The building was showing its age, and the museum lacked the technical infrastructure to host international exhibitions. Between 1993 and 1998, architect Paulo Mendes da Rocha — working with Weliton Ricoy Torres and Eduardo Argenton Colonelli — undertook a renovation that would win the Mies van der Rohe Prize for Latin American architecture. Mendes da Rocha did not disguise the building's unfinished character. Instead, he celebrated it, inserting steel-and-glass bridges across the open courtyards and using translucent skylights to flood the galleries with natural light. The exposed brick remained. The absent dome was not rebuilt. The renovation turned the building's imperfections into deliberate architectural statements, creating a museum where old and new exist in visible tension — brick walls from the 1890s framing contemporary steel, daylight shifting across surfaces that were designed for gas lamps.

In 2003, the Pinacoteca took on a second building with a much harder story. The Pinacoteca Estação occupies a structure designed by Ramos de Azevedo and opened in 1914 as a warehouse for the Companhia Sorocabana railway. From 1940 to 1983, however, the building served as the headquarters of DEOPS — the Department of Political and Social Order — São Paulo's political police. During Brazil's military dictatorship, which lasted from 1964 to 1985, the DEOPS became a site of imprisonment, interrogation, and torture. Today, the restored building houses temporary art exhibitions across eight thousand square meters, but it also contains the Memorial da Resistência de São Paulo, a museum dedicated to preserving the memory of political repression and the people who resisted it. The former detention cells have been maintained as a permanent exhibition. Art and memory share the same walls.

On March 4, 2023, the Pinacoteca opened its third building: Pina Contemporânea, integrated into the century-old Parque da Luz. The project, designed by Arquitetos Associados, connected two existing structures — one attributed to the Ramos de Azevedo office, the other a 1950s school building by architect Helio Duarte — with a covered public square spanning over 1,300 square meters. Below ground, a Grand Gallery of 1,000 square meters accommodates large-format contemporary works. Above, a mezzanine overlooks the park. The expansion was a long-standing dream: planning began in 2015, land was formally ceded in 2018, and construction knit together old and new architecture in the same spirit Paulo Mendes da Rocha had brought to the original building decades earlier. With Pina Luz, Pina Estação, and Pina Contemporânea, the museum now occupies three distinct structures across the Luz neighborhood, each carrying its own architectural and historical weight, united by a collection that tells the story of Brazilian art from its 19th-century academic beginnings to the present day.