Lina Bo Bardi - Design New York Wednesday, December 9, 2020 | Phillips

Design

New York Auction 9 December 2020

  • Provenance

    Marcelo Ferraz, Brazil
    Acquired from the above by the present owner, 2005

  • Literature

    Aric Chen, Brazil Modern: The Rediscovery of Twentieth-Century Brazilian Furniture, 2016, New York, pp. 125-27
    Adriano Pedrosa, José Esparza Chong Cuy, et al., eds., Habitat: Lina Bo Bardi, exh. cat., Museu de Arte de São Paulo, 2020, p. 334

  • Catalogue Essay

    Prolific 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, favoring 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, which was once in the personal collection of Marcelo Ferraz, one of her co-collaborators on the SESC Pompéia project, embodies this sentiment through its simple, compact design, which allows one to move and place the chair with ease and strike up a conversation.

65

Lina Bo Bardi

Chair, designed for the SESC-Pompéia Center, São Paulo

circa 1980
Pine.
27 1/2 x 15 1/2 x 20 1/4 in. (69.9 x 39.4 x 51.4 cm)

Estimate
$10,000 - 15,000 

Sold for $20,160

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Design

New York Auction 9 December 2020