Architecture History|SESC Pompéia — The 1986 Sports Towers That Completed a Factory's Public Reuse

Between SESC Pompéia’s two raw-concrete blocks, eight elevated bridges cross a strip of ground that could not be built upon; their circulation is the visible answer to a buried water gallery rather than a freestanding gesture. The Serviço Social do Comércio (SESC) commissioned Lina Bo Bardi in 1976 to turn a former metal-barrel factory at Rua Clélia 93 into a center for culture, sport, and leisure. People in the Pompéia neighborhood were already using the factory grounds for weekend recreation, and Bo Bardi treated that existing occupation—and the industrial sheds that contained it—as evidence for reuse rather than clearance. Working with architects André Vainer and Marcelo Ferraz, she began the project in 1977, retaining and adapting the factory structures for a theatre, library, studios, restaurant, workshops, exhibitions, and informal gathering. That first cultural and leisure phase opened in 1982, while the sports center at the rear was inaugurated in 1986; the date mapped here belongs to that later phase, not to the commission or the first opening. Preserving the sheds left little room for the sports program, and a protected underground water channel divided the remaining plot, so the team built upward in exposed reinforced concrete: a tall block stacking courts and a swimming pool, a slimmer block for changing rooms and vertical circulation, and a separate cylindrical water tower. Eight prestressed-concrete footbridges carry people between the sports and service blocks above the unbuildable strip, while irregular red-framed openings and board-marked surfaces make construction and circulation legible without pretending that the new work is old factory fabric. The water tower was also the product of collaboration: engineer Toshio Ueno worked with Bo Bardi on semicircular molds that allowed its concrete shell to be raised ring by ring on site. SESC supplied the social program, neighborhood users had already demonstrated the site’s capacity for collective life, and the architects’ intervention preserved that continuity while adding spaces the former factory could not accommodate. The complex received municipal protection in 2009 and federal listing by IPHAN in December 2015, evidence that an adaptive reuse undertaken before those designations had itself become protected heritage. SESC Pompéia remains an operating cultural and recreation center; from its public areas, visitors can read the difference between the retained industrial sheds and the later sports towers, while current entry and photography rules should be checked with SESC. The cover photograph, taken in December 2010, shows the later condition of the sports and circulation blocks with their connecting bridges, not the site on its 1986 inauguration date. Research basis: Instituto Bardi / Casa de Vidro; Renato Anelli in Docomomo Journal 61 (2019); SESC São Paulo; and IPHAN/CONPRESP heritage records. Photo: Paulisson Miura, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.