The Making of SESC Pompéia by Marcelo Ferraz
Window hole in SESC Pompeia. Photo Nelson Kon
The year 1982 saw the arrival of a new and striking architectural landmark in Brazil, in the city of São Paulo. It was the Centro de Lazer Fábrica da Pompéia (Pompéia Factory Leisure Centre), now known simply as SESC Pompéia. An architectural complex in some ways shocking, combining a red-brick building that had housed a drum factory since the 1920s – well proportioned, in the style of British factories – with three huge and unconventional concrete towers connected by aerial walkways.
At that time we were still digesting the modernist project of Brasilia and its aftermath. We were at the end of a 20-year military dictatorship, which contributed to an architectural mediocrity mirrored in works that lay outside our own culture and reality. And it was precisely at this moment, in this environment, that SESC Pompéia arrived, making waves across the still waters. It was a form of architecture that evaded easy classification. Strange? Ugly? Out of scale? Brutal, but also delicate? It was certainly something that seemed beyond the possible universe, unattainable by the hands of contemporary architects. It was a bomb, a shock.
It is worth noting that the opening of any SESC (Serviço Social do Comércio – Business Social Service) centre in a Brazilian city represents a significant change to the urban environment, given the facilities for leisure, education and culture that it offers the local population. The SESC is a non-governmental organisation linked to a national business federation, created in the 1940s to provide employees with health services and with sporting and cultural activities. In a way, given the extent of its activities, it has functioned in Brazil as a supplementary culture and sports ministry. But in the case of Pompéia, its influence on the city went even further.
Lina Bo Bardi, who had suffered ostracism for almost ten years, as a victim of the military regime and also of the conventional architectural outlook, surprised everyone with this gift to São Paulo. Paris had just seen the inauguration of the Pompidou Centre, an extravagant architectural model that caused a stir among students and young architects, and which would soon become a point of reference. It symbolised an escape route from a modernist model already somewhat in decline. Comparisons were therefore inevitable with the new cultural and sports centre that had sprung up in the district of Pompéia: they shared an industrial idiom; abrupt changes of scale; colours, many colours; and, principally, ‘strangeness’ in the context of their surroundings. And yet, despite all this, the two proposals were very distant and dissimilar in their origins, ideology and results.
At the invitation of the SESC directors, Lina, already middle-aged, plunged into a journey that would prove to be the most fruitful and prolific of her life. André Vainer and I, first as students and then as recent graduates, were privileged to take part in this adventure. For nine years (1977–86) we developed the project with Lina, working every day in the midst of the building site: monitoring the ongoing projects, the in situ experiments, the involvement of technicians, artists, and especially workers. This approach was a genuine revolution in the modus operandi of contemporary architectural practice. We had an office inside the building itself; the project and the programme were formulated as an amalgam, joined and inseparable. The barrier that would normally separate the virtual and the real did not exist; it was architecture made real, experienced in every detail.
André Vainer, Lina Bo Bardi and Marcelo Ferraz at SESC Pompeia, São Paulo, 1986. Photo Eduardo Simões
In 1982, the first stage of the complex was opened – the upgrading of the old Irmãos Mauser (Mauser Brothers) steel drum factory (later the Ibesa-Gelomatic refrigerator factory). Lina, with her keen and cultured eye, found out that the structure of the old factory had been created by one of the early 20th-century pioneers of reinforced concrete, Frenchman François Hennebique. Perhaps, in fact, it was the only concrete building of its kind in Brazil. There began, therefore, a process of stripping the buildings à la Matta Clark, removing the plaster and then sandblasting the walls in search of the buildings’ essence, the tectonics.
Water tower, SESC Pompeia, São Paulo, 1984. Photo Marcelo Ferraz
But this was only one aspect of the work, and certainly not the most important. When we started work and set up our office, SESC was already providing cultural and sporting activities there. This is, moreover, a common practice; it was also the case with the SESC centres at Belenzinho, Pinheiros and Paulista, where they began using the space in an improvised way, even before the renovation or construction work. At Pompéia we found various five-a-side football teams, an amateur theatrical group getting by on minimal resources, a third-age dancing club, a barbecue on Saturdays, a troop of junior cub scouts, and indeed lots of kids all over the place, like a flock of birds. Lina was very quick to tune in to the place: ‘What we want is precisely to maintain and amplify what we’ve found here, nothing more.’
The Programme:
Thus began the discussion about what kind of programme should be implemented. Instead of a ‘sporting and cultural’ centre, we began to use the term ‘leisure’ centre. ‘Cultural’, said Lina, ‘is too weighty, and can make people think they should perform cultural activities by decree. And that can lead to inhibition or traumatised dullness.’ She said the word ‘culture’ should be put in quarantine, given some rest, left to recover its original meaning and depth. And the term ‘sporting’ implied competition and dispute – which she considered a harmful tendency in a society already excessively competitive. It would just be ‘leisure’, therefore.
The new Centre was intended to foster conviviality as an infallible formula for cultural production (without needing to use the term). It would provide incentives to enjoy recreational sport, with a pool shaped like a beach for small children or for those who couldn’t swim, and sports courts with ceilings below the minimum height required by sports federations and therefore unsuitable for competition. The idea was to strengthen and promote recreation – ‘light’ sport, we might say. And so the programme and the project were merged, entwined, amalgamated.
Rio São Francisco do SESC Pompeia, São Paulo, 1977. Photo Antônio Saggese
Factory Scale:
The all-concrete sports block opened in 1986, and actually caused the biggest shock. Two concrete towers were erected, one with ‘cave mouths’ instead of windows, the other ‘randomly’ dotted with square windows across its facades. By the side of this, a third cylindrical tower, 70m high, also in concrete and marked by a ‘lace’ effect – a ‘tribute to the great Mexican architect Luis Barragán’, said Lina.
Linking the two towers, between the changing rooms and the sports courts, eight pre-stressed concrete walkways spanned gaps of up to 25m and created a whimsical, expressionist feel, evoking the Fritz Lang film Metropolis. It is important to remember that beneath the walkways ran a channelled stream – the Córrego das Águas Pretas (Black Waters Stream) – which created a non aedificandi area. The walkways, therefore, were not the result of a formal or arbitrary decision, but were a way in which the project responded intelligently to the realities of the location.
Sunny Sunday at SESC Pompeia. Photo Marcelo Ferraz
Background:
With the SESC Pompéia complex Lina was returning, with a critical perspective honed by a distance of 20 years, to her experience in Bahia (1958–64) during the rehabilitation of the Solar do Unhão, conceived as a Popular Art Museum but adversely affected by the 1964 military coup. Many of the concepts – the relationship between programme and project – had been tried out during that Bahian phase.
Key to the success of the project was the drawing up of a comprehensive and inclusive programme, and spatial solutions that would provide accessibility (bringing the street and public life into the Centre), and attract interest from all age groups and social classes, without discrimination. That is a role of architecture – indeed, one of its most noble. The open and inviting street, the exhibition spaces, the public restaurant with communal tables, cars strictly banned, the open-air activities culminating in the wooden decking area becoming ‘São Paulo beach’ in summer: all of this made SESC Pompéia a citadel of freedom, a dream of civic life made real.
SESC Pompeia, photo Nelson Kon
The Centre is like an oasis amidst the barbaric urban discomfort of our long-suffering São Paulo. Who doesn’t have a fond recollection of this place from all the years spent living in our densely-packed metropolis? The music shows, circuses, festas juninas, multi-ethnic festivals, memorable exhibitions – or even just meeting up with someone and doing very little, sitting on the public sofas beside the water or the fire… It seems that everything good has happened and continues to happen there. Of course, the cultural programmes run by SESC in its more than 30 centres across São Paulo state are the driving force. But I would venture to say, sharing the opinion of innumerable other people, that at Pompéia the flavour is special. Why?
Industrial Archaeology:
The rehabilitation of a former factory – a place of hard work; of suffering, for many; a testament to human labour – and its transformation into a place of leisure, without erasing its history, make SESC Pompéia a special space. The care taken to ensure that so many details of the old factory remained visible – whether on walls, floors, roofs and other structures, or in the new facilities – meant the space would begin its new life full of warmth and animation. With soul and personality.
The architectural language of the new buildings reinforced the manufacturing and industrial heritage of the complex. This language is present in the way the materials were used, and especially in the very scale of the place. Yes, the new buildings disrupt the delicate nature and ‘well-composed’ scale of brick warehouses and tiled roofs, presenting themselves as huge containers or industrial silos; the aerial walkways look like bridges or conveyor-belts that might transport grain or minerals. Everything is there to fulfil its role as an element in a centre for leisure. No one takes notes, no one rationalises – nor is it necessary to do so – but everyone feels through their five senses the presence of the factory in the architectural solutions. Everyone feels the respect for the history of human labour, which permeated every design decision.
An old disused factory, no longer serving the purpose for which it was designed, is reborn with striking touches. Sometimes violent, as in the concrete towers; sometimes delicate, as in the channels of rainwater running along the central street or in the wooden trellises on the windows. Sometimes with a heavy touch, sometimes light, Lina knew how to act in accordance with the architectural demands and the discourse to be communicated to all who passed, and still pass, through the Centre. After all, architecture is an effective and necessary means of communication. Lack of communication, in the broadest sense, is a major cause of the misfortunes our cities suffer today. But that is another story. Back to SESC Pompéia. Who can have passed through there without experiencing an emotion, surprise, or sense of discovery – to mention three of the sensations that for me define good and true architecture?
Theatre, SESC Pompeia, São Paulo, 1982. Photo Marcelo Ferraz
This experience holds a key for those who want to reflect on the role of architecture in human life: a key that is contemporary, active, and within reach. It is an architectural experience that combines creativity with great rigour, freedom with responsibility, richness with conciseness and an economy of means, poetry with ethics.
When asked about the role of architecture by students who visited SESC Pompéia in the 1980s, Lina said, referring specifically to the Centre: ‘Architecture for me is to see an old man or a child with a full plate of food walking elegantly across our restaurant, looking for a place to sit at a communal table.’ And then she added, in a voice that conveyed a life given to work and to a dream of a better world: ‘We had a socialist experiment here.’
