The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Lina Bo Bardi · a leisure centre of the Serviço Social do Comércio, scored as the leisure centre as it stands and is used: one work in two parts made in one campaign · the brick halls of a former factory of the 1930s, kept, stripped to the brick under their roof trusses and turned into a street of rooms for gathering, with the open hall of library, reading and exhibition space, the theatre, the restaurant and canteen and the workshops; and a new block of board-marked, in-situ concrete at the rear of the site, two towers (pool and courts in the larger; changing rooms, gymnasiums and stairs in the smaller) on either side of a strip that could not be built on, joined by bridges, with a cylindrical water tower beside them and a timber deck over the strip · Rua Clélia, Pompéia, São Paulo · commissioned 1977, the halls opened 1982, the sports block finished 1986 · Lina Bo Bardi, with André Vainer and Marcelo Ferraz, for SESC São Paulo · as it stands: in continuous use as a SESC centre since 1982, kept up and repaired, with no reconstruction; the factory as first built is context, except the fabric Bo Bardi kept as material of her own building
Mode
Leisure centre for working people; a factory kept and stripped as a street of rooms, with a new block of courts and pool in rough concrete
Mythos
The hearth and the river at the centre of a gathering place; the village street; the citadel and the cave cut in a cliff
Phase
Commissioned 1977; the halls opened 1982; the sports block, bridges and water tower finished 1986; in continuous use as a SESC centre since
Presentation
Brick sheds under trusses along an open street; an open hall with water across the floor and a fire; a theatre of two facing banks; two concrete towers joined by bridges, a water tower and a timber deck
Register
Warm and plain in the halls, grey, rough and exhilarating at the towers; red wherever the new hand touches
Scale
One institution’s leisure centre for a district and a city: labour, the body, culture and the community on one small plot
Governing Proposition
A public institution in São Paulo is given an old brick factory and a small plot behind it, and its architect keeps the factory as she finds it and builds a rough concrete block at the back. The wager is that the leisure of working people can be the civic life of a city rather than its remainder, that the place of labour can be turned over to that leisure without being disguised as anything but a factory, and that a poor, rough architecture can be dignified without finish, its dignity belonging to those who use it.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The Serviço Social do Comércio, SESC, is a Brazilian institution that serves the workers of commerce with leisure, sport and culture. In 1977 SESC São Paulo commissioned a centre on Rua Clélia in Pompéia, a low district of the city, on a plot that held the brick halls of a factory of the 1930s and a small piece of ground behind them. The design went to Lina Bo Bardi (1914 to 1992), with André Vainer and Marcelo Ferraz as her assistants on the work. The converted halls opened in 1982; the new sports block, its bridges and the water tower were finished in 1986.
The inheritance pointed elsewhere. In São Paulo the school of exposed concrete, of Vilanova Artigas and Paulo Mendes da Rocha, built single great roofs of tectonic rigour. The modernism of the clean slate would have cleared an old factory from a valuable plot and started again. Preservation, where it was practised, meant restoring a monument, and this factory was no monument; it had no listed value. Bo Bardi stood outside all three: an Italian-born woman with few buildings, working outside the Brazilian architectural establishment.
She kept the factory. The plaster was stripped back to the brick, the sheds were left as found under their roof trusses, and the street between them became the spine of the complex. What was added was sparse and robust. A public institution was thereby committed to a poor aesthetic, a decade before the reuse of industrial buildings became common practice, and the stake was hers and the institution’s.
Movement II
The street runs in from Rua Clélia between the sheds, and it is entered with no threshold of display: anyone from the district can walk in. Off it open the rooms of the halls: the theatre, the restaurant and canteen, the workshops, and the largest of them, the open hall of library, reading and exhibition space. The halls show what they are. Brick, trusses and light from above are left in view, and the factory is not disguised as anything but a factory. The place of labour is turned over to leisure in its own clothes.
In the open hall there are no closed rooms, only low partitions, so that reading, looking, sitting and talking are one undivided activity. Across the floor runs a shallow channel of water lined with stones, called the river, and in the living area burns an open hearth. These are not representations: a real fire at the centre of a gathering place and real water crossing its floor, the two oldest images of dwelling, set as working elements in a public room. They are also small and literal, almost domestic, and they can read as a quotation of the popular culture of the northeast that Bo Bardi admired.
The theatre was built in one of the sheds with its stage between two banks of seats facing each other, the seats of wood to Bo Bardi’s design, so that the audience sits in sight of itself across the stage. The furniture, like the graphics of the place, was hers, made to last under heavy use, and with the programme of events it belongs to the building’s use. Here the institution’s idea is made spatial: the hall’s absence of walls is the argument that leisure is common, and close the hall into rooms and the argument ends.
Movement III
At the rear of the site lay a strip of ground that could not be built on. It split the sports programme in two, and the plot was small, so the programme was stacked: two towers of board-marked, in-situ concrete stand on either side of the strip, the larger holding the pool and, above it, column-free courts, the smaller the changing rooms, gymnasiums and stairs. The towers had then to be joined, and they are joined by concrete bridges that zigzag across the gap at different levels. The most striking form on the site was compelled by drainage and land, not chosen for effect.
The walls of the larger tower are pierced by irregular openings without glass, closed by red-painted timber lattice shutters, and the courts behind them open to the sky and the city; play there is half out of doors. Beside the towers stands a cylindrical water tower, carrying the rings of its formwork as a deliberate texture: the formwork made the surface. Here the concrete refuses the order of the São Paulo school for holes, odd angles and a rough, almost primitive face. It still belongs to the brutalist family it bends.
The towers rise out of the low district as raw grey masses, and the bridges cross between them in mid-air with the force of a fortress or a quarry face. They carry the image of a citadel, the bridges a passage over forbidden ground, and the openings read as caves cut in a cliff. But the citadel is an image, not a route the visitor completes, and the towers’ interiors are conventional stacked courts. The concrete is rough by intent and in places by execution; the holes and bridges are bold rather than refined.
Movement IV
Over the strip between the towers lies a timber deck, used as a sun terrace and known to its users as the beach. On a Sunday it holds what the complex was made for: the leisure of working people taken as the civic life of a city, the courts and pool above, the street and halls beyond, all ages together. The ground that forbade building became the place where the body lies in the sun.
One law runs from the deck to the hall. Material is shown as it is, nothing applied to finish it, everything sized for heavy common use, and red marks wherever the new building’s hand touches: window frames, lattices, pipes and signs. The brick shed of the 1930s, found, horizontal, warm and old, and the concrete court tower of 1986, made, vertical, grey and new, obey it alike; so do the river’s stones, the hearth, the wooden chairs and the deck. The law bends where the towers’ fortress scale stands apart from the domestic register of the halls, so that the complex is two moods joined by a street.
The orders it holds are placed around one gathering hall rather than listed: labour, in the factory shell kept as such; the body, in courts, pool, gymnasiums and deck; culture, in theatre, library, exhibitions and workshops; the community and the family; the city, in the open street and the towers on the skyline; the natural order, in water, fire, the drainage that shaped the plan and the sun; history and memory, in the factory kept and the popular crafts brought into it. The sacred is absent but for the hearth’s echo; the state appears only as the institution; death is not in its range.
Movement V
The centre has been in continuous use as a SESC centre since its halls opened in 1982, and the use is heavy: people of the district and the city fill it still. Its form survives whole, halls, street, theatre, towers, bridges, water tower and deck as built, with no reconstruction. The fabric, exposed concrete and timber in a wet climate, has needed upkeep and repair, with no loss of form. Forty to forty-four years is a short span, and the rough surface is tied to a recognisable moment; but survival of form and use so complete, in the building’s own purpose, is of the strongest kind for its age.
The record of return is short, most of it since the 1990s, and much of it is advocacy for a rediscovered architect. The building has served the study of adaptive reuse and heritage, the politics of a building made for and with its users, feminist histories of modernism, Brazilian and Latin American studies of the São Paulo school and its dissenters, and the study of material and surface. It became a reference for turning industrial sites into cultural and social centres, and since the 2010s especially Bo Bardi’s work, and this building above all, has been taken as a model by architects in Brazil and abroad. That reach is delayed and partly a matter of reputation, and industrial reuse grew from many sources at once.
Beside it on the desk stands the Centre Pompidou (8.4), a public cultural centre of the same years, ahead of it in swerve and in reach, behind it in necessity and in living form. The Bauhaus at Dessau (8.3), another building whose programme is its argument, stands level. The Barbican Estate (8.1), rough concrete, towers, walkways and a public arts programme, and Niemeyer’s National Congress of Brazil (8.1) stand below it, on necessity and living form. On another desk Chaplin’s Modern Times (8.3), which set labour and the machine against the dignity of working people, stands level.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged on purpose, structure and site. The site sets most of the building. The strip that could not be built on forced the sports programme into two towers on either side of it, and the towers, stacked because the plot was small, forced the bridges: the most striking form on the site is compelled by drainage and land, not chosen for effect. The halls are kept because they could hold the gathering programme with almost nothing added. The unglazed openings answer air and light in a hot city. What holds the axis: the river and the hearth are gestures the purpose does not strictly need, the water tower is enlarged past its service, and some openings are free invention.
Score: 8.3 / 10
What can be stated, and holds: the leisure of working people can be the civic life of a city rather than its remainder, and a factory, the place of labour, can be turned over to that leisure without being disguised as anything but a factory. The street is public, and the open hall without closed rooms makes reading, looking, sitting by a fire and talking one activity. A second truth holds with it: a poor, rough architecture can be dignified without finish, and that dignity belongs to its users, not to the client or the architect. What holds the axis below the gate: the ideal is partly lived and partly staged, one institution’s programme, and some of what the visitor takes away is mood.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Elevation comes more than once, in a register of exhilaration and gravity more than transport. The towers rise out of the low district as raw grey masses pierced by red-framed holes, the bridges crossing between them in mid-air with the force of a fortress or a quarry face; inside, the stacked courts open through the holes to the sky. In the halls the height is of another kind: long brick sheds under their trusses, light from above, water across the floor and fire in the hearth. What holds the axis: much of the complex is plain and low by intent, the halls are comfortable more than elevated, and the summit moments gather at the towers and bridges, seen chiefly from outside or in passage.
Score: 8.1 / 10
The hearth in the hall is a real fire at the centre of a gathering place, and the river is real water crossing the floor: the two oldest images of dwelling, set as working elements in a public room. The towers and bridges build the image of a citadel, the bridges a passage over forbidden ground, and the unglazed openings read as caves cut in a cliff. What holds the axis: the hearth and river are literal and small, almost domestic, and can read as quotation of the popular culture Bo Bardi admired; the citadel is an image the towers carry, not a route the visitor completes; and the archetypes stand side by side rather than as one load-bearing structure.
Score: 8.1 / 10
The inheritance: the São Paulo school of exposed concrete, of Vilanova Artigas and Paulo Mendes da Rocha, with its great roofs and tectonic rigour; the clean slate, which would have cleared an old factory from a valuable plot; preservation as restoration of the monument; and Bo Bardi’s own earlier work. The departure is double: a factory of no listed value kept as found and made the centre of a new institution, a decade before reuse became common; and a new block that refuses the school’s order for irregular holes, odd-angled bridges and a rough surface. The stake was real: an Italian-born woman with few buildings, outside the establishment, committed a public client to a poor aesthetic. What holds it: reuse had precedents abroad, and the concrete still belongs to the brutalist family it bends.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Would a different form change what the building knows? Largely, yes. Put the same programme in a new building on a cleared site and the knowledge that leisure here takes place in the shell of labour is lost; close the hall into rooms and the mixing of reading, play and talk ends; replace the bridges with one slab and the sports become a facility rather than a climb across the city air. The form changes how its purpose is lived: the street admits anyone from Rua Clélia with no threshold of display, the theatre’s facing banks put the audience in sight of itself, and the unglazed openings make the courts half outdoors. What holds the axis: some of the knowledge is carried by programme and furniture, and the towers’ interiors are conventional stacked courts.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Evidence over promise, over four decades, most since the 1990s. The building has yielded to the study of adaptive reuse and heritage; to the politics of architecture, as a building made for and with its users; to feminist histories of modernism, in the long revival of her reputation; to studies of the São Paulo school and its dissenters; and to the study of material and surface. The questions concern meaning as well as making. What holds the axis: the record is short and much of it is advocacy for a rediscovered architect, and on return the plan is simple; its yield lies more in its use and its argument than in a depth of form that keeps opening.
Score: 8.1 / 10
The field is Brazilian and Latin American architecture of the late twentieth century and the reuse of industrial buildings worldwide. The intrinsic force is considerable: a public institution made from a found factory and a rough new block, against the clean slate and the polished monument alike. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: real but delayed and partly a matter of reputation; it became a reference for turning industrial sites into cultural and social centres, and since the 1990s, more since the 2010s, it has been taken as a model by architects in Brazil and abroad. Delayed influence is credited and discounted. What holds the axis: industrial reuse grew from many sources at once, and the rough concrete idiom was not taken up as a school.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Weighed on form, use and fabric, in that order, over 40 to 44 years. The form survives whole: halls, street, theatre, towers, bridges, water tower and deck as built, with no reconstruction. The use is the building’s own purpose, continuous since 1982 and heavy, a working SESC centre still filled with people of the district and the city; for its age, survival in use of the strongest kind. The fabric, exposed concrete and timber in a wet climate, has needed upkeep, with no loss of form. Its presence has grown wide since Bo Bardi’s revival, but fame is not proof, and the rough surface is still tied to a recognisable moment.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Judged as command of building, structure and engineering included. The command is real and of a particular kind: restraint in the halls, plaster stripped, trusses and brick left, new elements few and robust; stacked, column-free courts carried in a tower on a small plot; bridges spanning between the towers; board-marked concrete and a ringed water tower, where the formwork is made the surface; lattice shutters and wooden furniture made to last under heavy use. The costs: the concrete is rough by intent and in places by execution; the holes and the bridges are bold rather than refined; the factory’s structure is inherited, not made; and the first rank of the desk asks a structural invention this building does not claim.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the brick shed of the 1930s under its timber trusses, and the concrete court tower of 1986 with its unglazed holes. One is found, horizontal, warm and old, the other made, vertical, grey and new. They obey one law: material shown as it is, nothing applied to finish it, everything sized for heavy common use, and red wherever the hand of the new building touches, in frames, lattices, pipes and signs. The same law governs the river’s stones, the hearth, the wooden chairs and the deck. What bends it: the towers’ scale and fortress gesture stand apart from the domestic register of the halls, so that the complex is two moods joined by a street and a law of material.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Orders held: labour, in the factory shell kept as such and in an institution that serves workers of commerce; the body, in courts, pool, gymnasiums and the sun deck; culture, in the theatre, library, exhibitions and workshops; the community and the family, all ages together at the weekend; the city, in the street opened to the district and the towers on the skyline; the natural order, in water, fire, the drainage that shaped the plan and the sun; history and memory, in the factory kept. The gathering hall stands at the centre, so these are integrated, not listed. What holds the axis lowest: the sacred is absent but for the hearth’s echo, the state appears only as the institution, and consciousness and death lie outside its range. The figure describes the form.
Score: 7.9 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.3 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Living Form and The Imperishable at 8.6, The Swerve at 8.5, The Inner Law at 8.4. A form that makes leisure take place in the shell of labour, the street open to anyone, the hall without walls and the courts half out of doors; a building whole in form and in its own use since 1982; a factory of no listed value kept as found and a concrete block that bends its school, at a real stake; and one law of material shown as it is, across a brick shed and a concrete tower.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.9: labour, the body, culture, the community, the city, the natural order and memory are held around one hall, but the sacred, the state, consciousness and death are absent. Above it, The Sublime, The Archetypal Deep and The Bottomless Well at 8.1, then Pressure on Tradition at 8.2: elevation gathers at the towers and bridges; the hearth and river are literal and small and the citadel an image; the record is short; and the reach is delayed and partly a matter of reputation.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.3 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.6, The Inner Law at 8.4, The Made at 8.3, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 8.6 and The Swerve at 8.5 clear the bar of 8.5, the last at the threshold, but The Unconcealment at 8.3, Pressure on Tradition at 8.2 and The Archetypal Deep at 8.1 fall short. The Universal Minimum is met: no axis but The Encompassed falls below 8.1, against 7.5, and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.9. The aggregate of 8.3 stands below the summit in any case.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of SESC Pompéia, its published plans, sections and material, and its large photographic record; the building was not visited or measured. The work scored is the leisure centre as it stands and is used: one work in two parts made in one campaign, the brick halls of a former factory kept and stripped as a street of rooms (the open hall of library, reading and exhibition space, the theatre, the restaurant and canteen, the workshops), and the new concrete block at the rear (the two towers, the bridges, the water tower and the timber deck), commissioned in 1977, the halls opened in 1982 and the block finished in 1986. The factory as its first owners built it is context only, except where Bo Bardi kept its fabric as material of her own building; its inherited structure is not credited to her making. The programme of events, the furniture and graphics Bo Bardi designed for it, and the people who use it are weighed as the building’s use; no artwork held in it is scored. Upkeep and repair are weighed only under The Imperishable. The design is given under Lina Bo Bardi’s name, with André Vainer and Marcelo Ferraz as her assistants. No words are quoted: none is held with the certainty quotation requires, and the names the river, the beach and the citadel are given as names and images, not as quotation. Facts that could not be verified are not given: the factory’s first owners and products, and the system of its concrete frame; the river’s namesake; the seat count of the theatre; the name and course of the buried watercourse often said to lie under the strip; the number of courts; the heights and floor counts of the towers and the height of the water tower; whether the formwork of the water tower was slipped or stacked; Bo Bardi’s own terms for the place and for its architecture; and any heritage listing and its date.