← Back to Archive
Sesc Presidente Prudente
Sesc Presidente Prudente
Competition - Honorable Mention
When we encounters ourselfs with the world.
Thinking about a project for Sesc is, above all, thinking about encounters in their broadest dimension. It is creating spaces where individual narratives intersect with the collective, where inner worlds transform themselves as they relate to other forms of life. It is opening paths to experiences that give new meaning to the body, culture, space, and nature through dialogue. At Sesc Thermas de Presidente Prudente, the project values the singularity of the place: a territory where nature invites care and presence, fostering sensory, educational, and poetic experiences. Recognizing the territory's potential to activate connections between body and landscape, culture and environment, memory and creation, celebrating the encounter as an aesthetic, affective, and transformative experience, is one of our objectives.
To that end, we envisioned interlocking internal and external gardens, dissolving the boundaries between architecture and nature. The project incorporates and reframes the natural in counterpoint to a highly efficient construction system. For practical reasons, the building takes shape through a modular system of prefabricated pieces, structure, and enclosures. The structure, mostly in precast concrete, with cross-shaped columns, beams, and hollow-core slabs, ensures fast and precise buildability while, as systems, allowing great flexibility. This modularity facilitates varied uses and future expansions and optimizes construction, respecting the site and the landscape. The enclosures combine rigid panels, movable panels, transparent panels, and shading devices, forming an adaptable and visually unified system. The result is an architecture that is pragmatic, sensitive, and integrated with its surroundings.
Envisioning the building's operation, our guiding principles were spatial flexibility combined with low maintenance and an inexpensive operation. We therefore propose passive solutions such as cross ventilation and shading in specific locations. Internal and external vegetation improves air quality and creates microclimates with milder temperatures. The conscious use of water, through reflecting pools and channels, increases humidity on hot days, promoting comfort and reinforcing the connection between body, climate, and space.
Programmatically, the project is organized mostly around an internal street that connects uses and creates a fluid coexistence between program and landscape, giving space to a generous communal area onto which the theater opens. On the lower level, a service street supports operations and provides controlled access to technical areas. Programmatically, the functional cores can operate autonomously, respecting accesses and level changes, allowing simultaneous or isolated uses. Vertical connection is made by stairs and elevators as objects with clear character and materiality, helping users with spatial legibility.
At the urban scale, controlled accesses connect the building to the neighborhood at various points on the site. The project's ambition is to promote active relationships between city, body, and space, favoring a diversity of uses within a living, mutable space.We seek an architecture that enables encounters, experimentation, and belonging, opening itself to the nature of the territory and embracing the richness of the diversity that pulses through the Brazilian way of inhabiting this territory.
Author: Gustavo Utrabo
Team: Fernanda Britto, Julia Frenk, Gabriel Dias, Pedro Garcia Lopes
Photos: Gustavo Utrabo