history

The project

The history of Centro Cultural São Paulo begins in the seventies, when a 300 thousand square meters ground was given over to the City Hall. The area was a product of disappropriations caused by the subway construction, and was target of many speculations. In 1973, the Vergueiro Project was launched, and its purpose was to promote the urbanization of the area. The plan was to build an office complex, hotels, a mall and a public library in five years.

Two years later, the following city administration cancelled Vergueiro Project. The only thing that remained from the old plan was the construction of a public library. It was installed a comission composed of librarians, teachers and the architect Aron Cohen. The group's idea was to build a modern library where the reader would have free access to all the material. The objective was to open the collection to the public. The architect Eurico Prado Lopes won the competition opened in 1976, and the construction began in 1978.

The following city mayor, Reynaldo de Barros, decided to reformulate the project and adapt it to a multidisciplinary cultural center similar to the ones arising in the entire world, such as Georges Pompidou, founded in 1977 in Paris, France. Mário Chamie, who was São Paulo culture secretary at that time, claimed that the localization was ideal to install an institution like that. Besides, the building would be too large to be only a library. It was decided that the cultural center would have a cinema, theaters, a space for recitals and concerts, ateliers and exhibition areas. The architects Eurico Prado Lopes and Luiz Telles remained in charge of the project.

The conception of the cultural center was based in an extense research, in order to understand what the access to information meant in a country like Brazil. The building was projected within the goal to ease the approach between the public and what would be offered. Therefore, the architecture did not obey pre stablished patterns, focusing on wide dimensions and multiple entrances and paths.

The construction

Centro Cultural São Paulo was built in the last years of the Brazilian militar dictatorship. The proposal to value the multidisciplinary aspect of the spaces and avoid the compartmentalisation was polemic. In the words of architect Luiz Telles: "We were always alert to see the repercussion of our plans. It isn't that we were subversive, it's that the others were retrograde".

The project was largely discussed in the midia because, besides presenting concepts like integration and multidisciplinarity, its construction had a few technical problems, since it introduced many architectonical innovations. Researches and experimentations were held in order to achieve the final product. To viable the bold shapes intended by the architects, a lot of unusual materials were used, like glass, steel, concrete, acrilic, bricks and fabric.

The structures planned in the project demanded modifications in the traditional execution concepts, giving way to specific new techniques, in a process that was almost a craft. During the construction of the building, Emilie Chamie, Mário Chamie's wife, created the Centro Cultural's logo. The drawing is the representation of the union of curves and was created, according to its creator, taking into account the structures of the building.

The opening

The conception law of Centro Cultural São Paulo, promulgated on May 6th 1982, stablished that its attributes included: plan, promote, encourage and document artistic and cultural creations; gather and organize an information structure on human knowledge; develop researches on Brazilian culture and art, providing subsidies to their activities; encourage the involvement of the community, in order to develop the creative capacity of its members, allowing simultaneous access to different forms of culture and supporting educational, scientific and technological development.

The inauguration took place on May 13th 1982. The city mayor Reynaldo de Barros and culture secretary Mário Chamie received a great public composed of guests, workers and citizens. After the cerimony, they went through the dependencies of the building, watched musical concerts by Coral Paulistano and the pianist João Carlos Martins and had the opportunity to assess the works exhibited in the Art Gallery.

In 1982, São Paulo had approximately 8,5 million inhabitants, with a great number of them living in the suburbs. The intention of the rising cultural center was to gather these heterogeneous people, providing an area where everybody had access to different cultural genres.

In his speech during the inauguration cerimony, Mário Chamie highlighted all the work the building had demanded, pointing out that "for two years, ten months and a day in the morning, the afternoon and the evening, people had worked in that space". According to Chamie, it was necessary to provide popular and academic culture and all kinds of manifestations from different groups and communities, in order to reflect "all the Brazilian cultural equality that is made precisely of the differences".