Lina Bo Bardi - Design London Thursday, May 2, 2024 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    Private collection, São Paulo

  • Literature

    Aric Chen, Brazil Modern: The Rediscovery of Twentieth-Century Brazilian Furniture, New York, 2016, 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
    Sergio Campos, Lina Bo Bardi Designer: O Mobiliário dos Tempos Pioneiros 1947-1958, São Paulo, 2022, p. 53

  • 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, 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.

20

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

circa 1980
Pine.
68.5 x 39.6 x 48.5 cm (26 7/8 x 15 5/8 x 19 1/8 in.)

Estimate
£7,000 - 9,000 

Sold for £13,970

Contact Specialist

Antonia King
Head of Sale, Design
+44 20 7901 7944
Antonia.King@phillips.com
 

Design

London Auction 2 May 2024