Lina Bo Bardi (1914-1992) SESC Pompeia Chair 1979-82

Lina Bo Bardi (1914-1992) SESC Pompeia Chair 1979-82
A very rare Lina Bo Bardi Pompeiia pine stool baring the original badge found only on furniture designed by Bo Bardi, Marcelo Ferraz, and Marcelo Suzuki for the iconic SESC Pompéia leisure and cultural center in São Paulo between 1979-1982.

Architect and designer Lina Bo Bardi spent her working life primarily in Brazil, where her projects promoted architecture as an agent for integration between people and their city. Fittingly, Bardi was commissioned to design a center for the Serviço Social do Comércio (SESC) in Pompéia, a working-class district in São Paulo. The SESC is a non-profit private institution in Brazil that provides members with free or low-cost cultural and social activities. Designed and built between 1977 and 1986, Bardi and her collaborators retrofit an existing building that had been a tire factory with a sports complex, cafeteria, common spaces, and theater, among other amenities.

Bardi wanted the complex to be accessible and enduring, favouring strong, low-maintenance materials such as the existing concrete structure and local woods, like the pine used to construct the present chair. This chair, along with the other examples made for the SESC Pompéia, was executed by the construction workers on site with Bardi’s supervision and assistance. A constant promoter of the social and cultural possibilities of design, Bardi said, “For me, architecture is seeing an elderly man or a child with a plate full of food elegantly crossing our restaurant looking for a place to sit at a collective table.” The present chair embodies this sentiment through its simple, compact design, which allows one to move and place the chair with ease and strike up a conversation.

Literature:
A. Chen, Brazil Modern, The Monacelli Press, New York 2016, pp. 126-127;
Lina Bo Bardi (org. Marcelo Carvalho Ferraz) p. 225, 228;
Cidadela da Liberdade, Sesc Sa?o Paulo e Instituto Bardi, 1999, p. 85, 87;
Maria Cecilia Loschiavo dos Santos, Movel Moderno no Brasil, ed Olhares, Sao Paulo, 2015, p.139

Dimensions:
Height: 27.17 in (69 cm)
Width: 15.75 in (40 cm)
Depth: 19.69 in (50 cm)
Seat Height: 18.9 in (48 cm)

Location:
New York