ARCHITECTURE FOR ALL In May 1982, a new place came into existence in São Paulo. Sesc Pompeia was the outcome of long and dedicated work on a project that had started almost six years beforehand, when architect Lina Bo Bardi first visited the former Mauser Brothers steel-drum factory in the heart of Pompeia, a working-class district not far from downtown São Paulo. Having owned the property for several years, Sesc planned to turn it into a new cultural and sports complex. Thus, Bo Bardi was commissioned to design this project that eventually would transform the cultural life of São Paulo and Brazil. The architect’s portfolio included the Museu de Arte Popular da Bahia, a folk art museum she housed in the Solar do Unhão, in Salvador, in the late 1950s, and Museu de Arte de São Paulo – Masp, on Avenida Paulista, in São Paulo. Paris had just dedicated the Georges Pompidou Center at Beaubourg, in the Marais quarter, which still retained the characteristics of a city radically changed in the late 19th-century aftermath of the period’s major political and economic transformations. Unlike that initiative of razing a few blocks to make way for the new center, Sesc decided to keep the old factory and reshape it for its new purpose, rather than demolish it to build a new complex.
Author unknown – Acervo Instituto Lina Bo e P. M. Bardi
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[1], [2], and [3] The factory buildings now occupied by Sesc Pompeia were erected by the German Mauser & Cia Ltda. company, in 1938. In 1945, a Brazilian steel-drum company called Embalagens Ibesa bought the site, later using the facilities to make Gelomatic kerosene refrigerators. [4] Ad for Gelomatic refrigerators. [5] Pompeia neighborhood, c. 1940.