SESC Pompéia

The Fábrica da Pompéia was opened in 1938 by the German firm Mauser & Cia to make oil drums, and later refrigerators. When Lina Bo Bardi first walked into the disused sheds in 1976 she found football teams and a theatre company already using them, and decided that the life she had found there was the brief. She kept the brick sheds, took out the internal walls and cut a rippling pool into the concrete floor. The sports programme would not fit, so she put it in two raw-concrete towers on a strip of ground that could not legally be built on, and linked them with eight aerial walkways. The towers are punched with openings of no fixed size or rhythm, framed in bright red, which read from the street as something between a fortress and a piece of cardboard someone tore holes in. The leisure block opened on 22 January 1982 and the sports block was finished in 1986.