









































There is perhaps no more compelling example 
of Hannah Arendt’s “space of appearance” than 
Lina Bo Bardi’s Museum of Art in São Paulo, MASP, 
designed in 1957 for the Assis Chateaubriand art 
collection previously housed in an old downtown 
building. Although the work of the Italian émigré 
architect Lina Bo Bardi was always independent 
of the so-called Paulista School, the audaciously 
monumental structure of her museum, suspended 
clear of the ground from two deep, long span 
reinforced concrete beams resting on four equally 
gigantic reinforced concrete piers, served to create 
a partially covered terrace, opening off the Avenida 
Paulista and overlooking the verdant landscape of 
Trianon Park. Ever since its completion in 1968 
which happened to coincide with the worldwide 
student revolt, this space has served as the ultimate 
Paulista symbolic site for spontaneous political 
demonstrations. As an Arendtian cultural nexus 
with a similar political potential Bo Bardi’s museum 
will be matched at virtually the same time by a top-
lit, equally monumental core incorporated into 
the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism built on 
the campus of São Paulo University to designs of 
the architect João Vilanova Artigas, between 1959 
and 1961. The result, in both instances was the 
creation of a res publica that corresponded, however 
inadvertently, to Arendt’s concept of “the space of 
appearance,” as first defined by her under the rubric 
work in her magnum opus The Human Condition 
of 1958: 

The manmade world of things, the human 
artifice erected by homo faber, becomes a home 

The Space of Appearance Within the
Megalopolis. Architectural Culture-
Politics of São Paulo 1957-2017

Kenneth Frampton



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for immortal men, stability of which will endure and outlast the ever-
changing movement of their lives and actions, only insomuch as it 
transcends the sheer functionalism of things produced for consumption 
and the sheer utility of objects produced for use.  Life in its non-
biological sense, the span of time each man has between birth and death, 
manifests itself in action and speech…If the animal laborans needs the 
help of the homo faber to ease his labor and remove his pain, and if 
mortals need his help to erect a home on earth, acting and speaking 
men need the help of homo faber in his highest capacity, that is the 
help of artists, of poets and historiographers, of monument-builders 
or writers, because without them the only product of their activity, the 
story they enact and tell, would not survive at all.  In order to be what 
the world is always meant to be, home for men during their life on 
earth, the human artifice must be a place fit for action and speech, for 
activities not only entirely useless for the necessities of life but of an 
entirely different nature from the manifold activities of fabrication by 
which the world itself and all things in it are produced.1

Although Arendt never alludes to the megalopolis per se, which in any case 
in the late 50’s had yet to be acknowledged this is the “placeless” landscape 
she foresees in The Human Condition when, in the fifth chapter, she defines 
the “space of appearance” in the following terms:

The space of appearance comes into being whenever men are gathered 
together in a manner of speech and action and therefore precedes all 
formal constitution of the public realm…Only where potentialities 
of action are always present can power remain with them and the 
foundation of cities which, as city states have remained paradigmatic 
for all Western political organization is therefore the most important 
prerequisite for power…Power preserves the public realm and the space 
of appearance and as such it is the life blood of the human artifice…
Without being talked about by men and without housing them, the 
world would not be a human artifice but a heap of unrelated things 
to which each isolated individual was free to add one more object…
without the enduring permanence of the human artifice there cannot 
be any remembrance of things that are to come with those that shall 
come after…2

And it is also much the same megapolitan landscape she has in mind when 
in her later critique of consumerism, she writes:



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In our need for more and more rapid replacement 
of worldly things around us we can no longer 
afford to use them, to respect and preserve their 
inherent durability, we must consume, devour, 
as it were, our houses and furniture and cars 
as though they were the good things of nature 
which spoil uselessly if they are not drawn swiftly 
into the never-ending cycle of man’s metabolism 
with nature.  It is as though we had forced open 
the distinguishing boundaries which protected 
the world, the human artifice, from nature, the 
biological processes which goes on in its very 
midst as well as the natural cyclical processes 
which surround it delivering and abandoning 
to them the always threatened stability of the 
human world.3

In the last chapter of The Human Condition, entitled 
the ‘Vita Activa and the Modern Age,’ Arendt 
touches on the socio-economic consequences of the 
mass ownership of the car without which the demise 
of the city and the emergence of the megalopolis 
would not have been possible.

If, in concluding, we return once more to 
the Archimedian point and apply it, as Kafka 
warned us not to do, to man himself and to 
what he is doing to this earth, it at once becomes 
manifest that all of his activities, watched from 
a sufficiently removed vantage point in the 
universe, would appear not as activities of any 
kind but as processes, so that as a scientist recently 
put it, modern motorization would appear like 
a process of biological mutation which human 
bodies gradually begin to be covered by shells 
of steel.  For the watcher from the universe, this 
mutation would be no more or less mysterious 
than the mutation which now goes on before our 
eyes in those small living organisms which we 
fought with antibiotics and which mysteriously 
have developed new strains to resist us…we live 

  although 
arendt never 

alludes to the 
megalopolis, 
this is surely 

the placeless 
landscape she 
foresees in the 

human condition. 

“

”



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in this society as though we were as far removed from our own human 
existence as we are from the infinitely small and the infinitely large 
which, even if they could be perceived by the finest instruments, are too 
far away from us to be experienced.4  
   

The Arendtian ideal of the city-state was not only predicated on the remote 
model of the ancient Greek polis but also on the or worker’s councils that 
emerged spontaneously in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution of 
1917, only to be instantly suppressed by the triumphant Bolsheviks party.  
Arendt’s other example of council formation were the groups formed 
during the Hungarian Revolt of 1956, which she equally admired and 
which were also summarily suppressed. Perhaps no one has understood 
Arendt’s concept of direct democracy better than Shmuel Lederman in 
his study Hannah Arendt and Participatory Democracy of 2019 wherein he 
wrote:

Ultimately, the different way Arendt conceptualized the meaning and 
the potential of the councils emanated not so much from historical 
idiosyncrasies as from the different ontological and epistemological 
foundations of her political thought namely from the way she “politicized” 
German existentialism and used Heidegger’s phenomenological method 
to offer a strikingly original analysis of the experience of action and 
speech in the public sphere.5

Later, Lederman cites two recent examples of participatory democracy: 
first, the Indian state of Kerala, which, had, in the past, been under a 
democratically elected communist government and second, the city of 
Porto Alegre in the South of Brazil. Of this last Lederman writes:

… In the spirit of the council tradition, participatory budgeting in 
Puerta Alegre continually challenged the very structure of hegemonic 
representative democracy…participatory institutions now play a role 
channeling demands emerging from organized communities;…the 
blurring between state and society occurs as government officials and 
community leaders now occupy a space within state institutions…(in 
recent years 100,000 residents have taken part) in a process prioritizing 
public works, such as street paving, the laying of water and sewerage 
lines, the building of new schools and hospitals and so on.6

 
As the title of this essay intimates, “spaces of appearance,” in a cultural 
if not an overtly political sense, have intermittently appeared over the 



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years within the exceptionally vast and placeless 
megalopolis of São Paulo. Such spaces have been 
an intrinsic part of the urban culture of São Paulo 
since the foundation of the SESC organization (the 
Serviço Social do Comércio; EN: Social Service of 
Commerce) in 1945, which was conceived from the 
outset as providing a certain sector of workers with 
beneficial social, recreational and cultural facilities. 
The socio-cultural agenda of this welfare provision 
was first given an architectural formulation in the 
so-called SESC Pompeia designed by Lina Bo Bardi 
in 1977, in collaboration with Marcelo Ferraz. 
This work entailed the conversion of a disused, 
single story factory in the center of the city into a 
complex combining multiple facilities, including 
an 800-seat restaurant, a reading room, a library, a 
750-seat theatre and a dental clinic. Bo Bardi would 
add to this same complex a new multi-story sports 
center, housing among other facilities a gymnasium 
and indoor swimming pool. This new addition was 
built out of exposed, in situ reinforced concrete in 
manner of Le Corbusier’s bêton brut.  Its multi-
story, silo-like form, linked by ramps to a concrete 
access tower, was given an industrial character so as 
to appear as if it had always existed in relation to 
the original single-story, monitor-lit factory. The 
interstitial space between the two was landscaped 
in such a way as to provide a nominal, artificial 
“beach” in which users could sun bathe.

This achievement was echoed in 2017 by the 
realization of another SESC complex within the São 
Paulo megalopolis; the so-called SESC 24 de Maio 
built to the designs of the late Paulista architect 
Paulo Mendes da Rocha, who collaborated with 
one of his former pupils, Maria Moreira, a founding 
partner in the practice, MMBB. Here again we have 
the of SESC commissioning the re-use of an existing 
structure, this time a disused department store which 
since it was largely ruined had to be extensively 
rebuilt. Apart from providing the usual mix of SESC 
amenities, the entire work was predicated on the 

“spaces of 
appearance,” 

in a cultural if 
not an overtly 
political sense, 

have been an 
intrinsic part 
of the urban 

culture of 
São Paulo 

since the 
foundation of 

the SESC 
organization 

in 1945.

“

”



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heroic idea of building a large swimming pool on top of an existing 13-story 
structure. This daring engineering concept was predicated on supporting 
the pool and the rest of the building on four gigantic reinforced concrete 
columns, each measuring 1.2 meters in diameter. These four columns were 
centered on the four corners of a square, set within the virtual square of 
the original building with a continuous pedestrian access ramp rising up 
to one side of the column grid. The pool on the roof was surely a manifest 
improvement on the narrow “urban beach” which had been a key feature in 
the SESC Pompeia. The raison d’etre behind this seemingly counter-intuitive 
decision to place the heavy weight of the pool at the top of the building 
would be accounted for by the architect in the following:

The pool choses its place not the architect.  A sunny, open pool, despite 
the winter, is completely different from a closed, heated pool.  My 
image is Copacabana, Leblon, Ipanema!7

In a conversation with the Chilean architect Enrique Walker in 2018, 
Mendes da Rocha will make the ideological stratagem of the Paulista 
School of Architecture explicit, in his response to Walker’s question as to 
the political implications of the SESC 24 de Maio, when he remarked: 

Every project is a political statement. The project idea is one of projection 
of the future.  So, the intention is to imagine what we should be, what 
we can be. The design is not simply a matter of architecture…Generally 
speaking, society throughout the world is exclusive, in principle. It 
always protects itself from free public action: these are the famous gated 
communities, the buildings with security. We made this building open 
to public use as much as possible. And SESC comes into that as well, 
which tells us something about SESC policies.  So, everything we do has 
a political value; there is a political essence in the idea of decision. And 
the new occupation of an existing building is part of a very interesting 
policy linked to the economy. You are better off reusing buildings rather 
than discarding them … Every construction, every action of ours has 
value, a political essence, which must be read between the lines of what 
is there…in architecture in particular, the first thing it entails is to 
seduce others so that they can see the dimensions of what, despite the 
circumstances we must do.8

Among the architects practicing in São Paulo over the last half of the 20th 
century there has perhaps been no figure who has been more aware of the 
profound challenges posed by the São Paulo megalopolis, now covering a 



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million square kilometers with a population of 30 
million people, than Paulo Mendes da Rocha. As 
he put it at an earlier moment when the population 
stood at 20 million: “it would have better to have 
built ten cities of 2 million each.” For Mendes da 
Rocha the megalopolis has been a challenge that can 
only be significantly addressed by creating public 
spaces, within which to resist the overwhelmingly 
disjunctive “non-place” of the megalopolis, not only 
in terms of culture-politics but also psychologically. 
Hence his penchant for creating microcosmic 
public realms such as his Poupa Tempo, the so-called 
“time-saving” building realized in the center of the 
city in 2008. The Swiss architect Annette Spiro’s 
appraisal of this work encapsulates the ennobling 
quality of this mutual interface between the general 
public and the municipality; a building that in 
effect serves as a range of offices for the granting 
of licenses and the payment of rates, taxes and 
fees, etc. In her view: “what could have easily been 
a labyrinth of bureaucracy is exactly the opposite; 
a singular 300-meter-long space, a bridge, an airy 
hall, an elongated public square…By virtue of one 
grand gesture, urbanistic, functional and spatial 
intentions are cogently satisfied.”9

In this one work one is able to appreciate fully 
the underlying ideology of the São Paulo school 
of architecture as this was initially envisaged 
by the architect, João Vilanova Artigas and the 
historian-theorist, Flavio Motta; that is to say the 
accommodation of socio-cultural and politically 
progressive programs within the fabric of tectonically 
articulated, monumental form. It is this that surely 
accounts for Mendes da Rocha’s assertion that 
engineering and architecture should be one and the 
same, although he would be the first to concede 
that this tectonic ethos is not, in and of itself, able 
to serve as an adequate point of departure before the 
dystopic fragmentation of the megalopolis for, as he 
would put it: “A city’s memory is not a continuous 
accumulation of eternities. It can only be preserved 

Every 
project is 

a political 
statement.

“
”



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in its historical discontinuity. We have to have the courage to face this 
inevitable discontinuity and turn it into stimulus.”10

In this regard Mendes da Rocha’s capacity to imagine and create spaces 
of public appearance would be particularly challenged in 2000 when he 
received from both Rio de Janeiro and Paris separate commissions to design 
sports facilities as part of their rival bids to host the Olympic games of 2008. 
What is significant about these two quite different proposals, with the one 
much more extensive and ambitious than the other, is that they were both 
designed for the worldwide megalopoli, i.e. for universal placelessness just 
as prevalent in the urbanistic chaos surrounding the Hausmannian core 
of Paris, as it is throughout the vast extent of the São Paulo megalopolis 
and where the one would consist of a number of different interventions 
on multiple sites, the other consisted of a single large stadium related to 
a pre-existing canal and podium of smaller stadia accommodating various 
specialized sports, i.e.  the so-called “sports boulevard.” What Mendes da 
Rocha had to say about his various proposals for the urbanized region of 
São Paulo emphasizes the potential opportunity provided by the games 
as an incentive for the reconstruction of city form.  As he would write of 
his piecemeal project of repairing the degradation of megalopolitan fabric 
around São Paulo:

… It proposes to intervene in places that today, despite their effective 
urban structuring are nonetheless degraded, as happens in all the world’s 
dynamic cities, with railway stations, unwanted polluted waterways and 
unexpected empty lots.  Thus, the proposal envisages the urbanization 
of abandoned areas, weaving houses, with new leisure, health and 
education facilities right into the existing urban fabric.11

There are perhaps no two works from the middle of the last century having 
more disparate implications than Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition 
of 1958 and Jean Gottman’s Megalopolis of 1962 for while Arendt’s 
concept of “the space of appearance” may be seen in retrospect as being of 
importance for the practice of architecture, Gottman’s relevance resided 
in the fact that he was the first to recognize that the urbanized region was 
already an emergent and universal condition. This, is ever more the case 
today as we veer towards the urbanization of 75% of world’s population by 
2050, according to the three-volume study The Endless City, published by 
the London School of Economics in 2007. In this regard, it may well be that 
Brazil in general and São Paulo in particular proffer a range of socio-cultural 
interventions that are of particular pertinence today given the inevitable 
wholesale urbanization of the planet. I have in mind in the first instance 



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the extraordinary capacity of Paulista municipality 
to build a large number of school-cum-community 
centers for the poorest sectors of society. There is 
surely no school building program of comparable 
stature and speed of realization anywhere else in the 
world today. This exceptional achievement suggests 
that even under globalized capitalism there is much 
to be said for the potential of the city state or the 
urbanized region to overcome the political ‘non-
place’ of the megalopolis in its most alienated form. 
This much seems to be implied by Chantal Mouffe’s 
recent thesis of Agonistics, first published in 2013 
as a political stratagem to overcome the current 
impasse of representational democracy.  In this she 
cites with approval the political philosophy of the 
Italian intellectual, Massimo Cacciari, who having 
served twice as the mayor of Venice, recommends 
a future policy in which he advocates “federation 
from the bottom” as opposed to the current union of 
European nation states which although they derive 
from representational democracies, are nonetheless 
subject to the top-down regulatory power of the 
European Union.  In her appraisal of Cacciari’s 
thesis, Mouffe writes: 

What Cacciari advocates can be conceived as a 
type of federal union in which the component 
units would not be limited to nation states and in 
which the regions would also play an important 
role. From the point of view of an agnostic 
model for Europe, I find particularly interesting 
his claim that such a union would manifest a 
form of autonomy exercised in systems which 
are integrated in a conflictive mode, and that 
it would combine solidarity and competition.  
Incorporating Cacciari’s proposals, we could 
imagine a European Union that would not only 
be a demio-cracy composed of nation states, 
but one where there would be a multiplicity 
of different kinds of demio, where democracy 
could be exercised at different levels and in a 

It is of the 
utmost import-

ance that the 
architect should 

have conceived of 
his intervention 

in terms of 
giving rise to 

auditoria and 
their attendant 

“spaces of 
appearance” 

without which 
architecture, has 
no socio-political 

cultural 
significance.

“

”



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multiplicity of ways.  Such a view recognizes and articulates different 
forms of collective identities and their new modes of co-operation.12

Of equal consequence as “spaces of appearance” has been the exemplary 
policy pursued by the city during the first decade of the 21st century wherein 
it would realize an extensive program of school building throughout the far-
flung periphery of the city, situating these schools in the midst of center-less 
favelas, that is in the heart of spontaneous, self-built housing settlements, 
dating back from the 60’s, as they are to be found throughout the fringes 
of the city. Twenty-one such schools were built by the city under the 
mayoralty of Marta Suplicy who was affiliated with Lula da Silva Worker’s 
Party during his first presidency, 2003-2010. Since then another twenty-
five schools-cum-community centers have been built under the rubric of 
Centros Educacionais Unificados (EN: Unified Educational Centers) or 
CEUs.  These large complexes incorporate a wide range of supplementary 
social services including theatres, cinemas, sports facilities, nursery 
schools, kindergartens, vocational high schools, dance halls, swimming 
pools, clinics, etc. CEUs were also conceived as accommodating university 
extension courses which would be coordinated by the Federal Government. 
Largely designed by the architect’s department of municipality under the 
leadership of Alexandre Delijacov, André Takia and Wanderley Ariza, these 
educational complexes now distributed throughout the periphery of the 
city constitute potential “spaces of appearance” in a political sense.  

All of this incorporates, in so many respects, the essence of Paulista 
architectural culture-politics made manifest throughout the conurbation, 
notwithstanding the traumatic political changes to which Brazil has been 
subjected over the past seven decades. In this regard it is significant when 
it comes to the megalopolitan proliferation of free-standing objects it is 
significant that Mendes da Rocha invariably worked at two different scales; 
on the one hand, at the scale of microcosmic intervention, such as his Poupa 
Tempo building or his Arc of the Patriarch of 2007 and, on the other, at the 
continental scale of the territory at large. A measure of this was evoked by 
Mendes da Rocha in his 1980 proposal for the regularization of the Bay of 
Montevideo in Uruguay of which he wrote:

The straightened lengths of the bay front are focused on the water, and 
provide new recreation areas in the form of gardens, plazas, theatres, 
cinemas, cafes, restaurants. Transformed into a city square on water, 
3 km across between Cerrito Hill and the harbor and lying between 
different city districts and centers, the bay bustles with light passenger 
traffic and makes a lively and sophisticated impression. At a remote 



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and delightfully situated point in the bay a tiny 
island was transformed into a theatre, after the 
manner of the Venetians. Perhaps one night an 
inexpressibly haunting melody from its shores 
will linger over the city.  Who knows it would be 
even like Villa-Lobos’s, Floresta do Amazonas.13

However improbable and costly such a modification 
would have been, it would have afforded a new 
territorial datum capable of unifying the placeless 
megalopolis surrounding the Bay of Montevideo 
throughout its perimeter. It is of the utmost 
importance that the architect should have conceived 
of his intervention in terms of giving rise to auditoria 
and their attendant “spaces of appearance” without 
which architecture, as the most material of the arts, 
has no socio-political cultural significance.

Endnotes
1. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Second 

Edition), (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 
1998 [1958]), 173-174.

2. Ibid., 199-200.
3. Ibid., 125,126.
4. Ibid., 322, 323.
5. Shmuel Lederman, Hannah Arendt and 

Participatory Democracy. A Peoples Utopia (Cham, 
Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 185.

6. Ibid., 200.
7. Andres Lepak and Daniel Talesnik, Access for All. 

São Paulo’s Architectural Infrastructures (Zurich: 
Park Books, 2019), 189.  

8. Lepak and Talesnik, Access for All, 193.
9. Annette Spiro, Paulo Mendes da Rocha. Works 

and Projects (Zurich:  Niggli, 2002), 27.
10. Rosa Artigas, Paulo Mendez da Rocha, 50 years, 

(New York: Rizzoli, 2007) 24.
11. Ibid., 85.
12. Chantal Mouffe, Agnostics (London: Verso, 

2013), 53.
13. Spiro, Paulo Mendes da Rocha, 162.


