A designer, artist, and scholar, he earned degrees in architecture, landscape architecture, and urbanism from the University of São Paulo, and completed his postdoctoral training in comparative literature at Columbia University. Lima received the 2007 Bruno Zevi Prize for architectural history and criticism, and his extensive publications include "Lina Bo Bardi"—a biography about the Italian-born Brazilian architect—and a forthcoming coedited anthology of texts by architects from Latin America.