Leisure Center Sesc Santo Amaro

Designing a unit for SESC (Commerce Social Service) means to work for the promotion of culture, sports and leisure, as this is the largest and best provider of such services in Brazil. Our responsibility as authors of the project increases because of the complexity of this type of urban equipment, which is used with intensity and must maintain its quality over time.

Besides, it’s also important to understand the wide range of user profiles and of activities to be offered.

The project of the SESC unit in Santo Amaro, located at Rua Amador Bueno, neighborhood of Santo Amaro, São Paulo City, Brazil, proposed an urban and compact unit, given the dimensions of the ground, 7,588.32 m2, and the constructed area, 14,610.00 m².

We designed a predominantly horizontal building, where the user has total visual and sensory control of its different areas and of the activities developed in them, facilitating and stimulating different objects of interest for different types of users and allowing to integrating culture, sport and leisure.

The concept of transparency and mobility was also developed when defining the sealings and furniture, with large colorless transparent glass planes internally dividing areas when needed, and on the façades green screenprinted laminated glass, functioning as transparent sun sun-breaks.

The unit consists of a basement which occupies the full extent of the land, with concrete structure and pre-tensioned slabs; a longitudinal block of in situ concrete structure on which there is a ground level and two floors where there are the areas which require isolation, such as kitchen, theater, fitness rooms, dance, dental clinic, administration, art workshops, cafeteria, help center and multipurpose rooms; and adjacent to this block there is a large steel covered area three times higher where there are the coexistence area, semi-olympic pool, which also works as a large water mirror, the indoor sports court, dressing-room and squares.