The interventions pretends to demonstrate the virtues of density and mixed uses as catalyst of future life in urban context.
Project description by MMBB architects
We believe that the process of transformation and development of cities like São Paulo is made slowly adapting to the changes in the customs and way of life of the societies that build them.
The new SESC unit - a complex set of recreation facilities and services - that will occupy the former Mesbla headquarters building, located at the corner of 24 de Maio Street with Dom José de Barros Street, downtown São Paulo, is an example of intervention into urban heritage.
With these horizons, the proposed project intends, besides the simple use and adaptation of facilities that originally attended to uses of nature so different from those currently being proposed, to contribute effectively to the desired recovery of such a remarkable area of the city in the following order of basic ideas:
1. OPEN, with a square under the existing building, the idea of an open place. The "Square of SESC", with a gallery of free passage, linked to the life of the neighborhood.
2. Transform the old basement of the garage into Café and a Theater linked to Rua 24 de Maio.
3. To create a new vertical circulation system that, in addition to meeting the safety requirements of the Building Code, through the proposing of RAMPS, also propose a clear and continuous circuit capable of an architecturally promenade which enclosure the city in the various places and activities specific to the programs of the SESC triggering it in a playful way.
4. A Restaurant, of free public use, immediately above the Square and Administration of SESC.
5. Set some spaces in strategic levels with the sense of covered squares, without fence in the facades, suspended gardens.
6. Adopt occasional two-level associations, with a large hall, part with double right foot, and upper and lower galleries, for some items of the program, in order to value enclosures and avoid the monotony of simple overlapping type floors.
7. Building a "Plaza do Sol" on the roof, with a swimming pool.
8. To make visible in the façades a character resulting from the new arrangement for the mass of the building, where one sees this unexpected succession of overlapping activities, a new and peculiar building in the city with its own character.
9. Concentrating and isolating the technical and mainly mechanical facilities to support the various activities suggested in the entity's program, and annexed, for this purpose, the contiguous property in Rua Dom José de Barros - abandoned a few years ago - for the construction of an auxiliary complex of services and machines, Tower Services.
In order to realize these transformations that, in fact, characterize the proposed project and inaugurate a new spatiality, from the point of view of the constructive techniques and prediction of facilities, the following measures were adopted:
1. Demolition of parts of the existing set, which does not offend the original basic structure, including the covered hall of the old Mesbla to create a void inside the existing building.
2. The construction of a new independent structure, supported by four main pillars that cross the central void, which supports the large interspersed halls and the volume of the solarium with pool on the roof.
3. The relegation, somewhat, of the area of the current underground garage to complete the volume of the Theater and its annexes, carefully respecting the limits of proximity and area of influence of existing foundations and neighboring buildings.
4. The feasibility of double floors and open circulation with the prediction of an elaborate mechanical smoke control system covering all levels of the building which, as required by the Fire Department, complements the usual safety devices for a building intended for the proposed uses.
The main objective of this project is to demonstrate the virtues of the future life of the city, while claiming the privilege of occupying such a noble place of São Paulo.
