SESC Pompéia

This guide to SESC Pompéia in São Paulo follows a steel-drum factory that filled these brick sheds with oil barrels from 1938 until the presses stopped, and the workers who kept slipping back in on weekends for football and amateur theater. It traces architect Lina Bo Bardi, who moved her office into the dying building in 1977 and spent nine years there sandblasting a century of grime off the walls. The guide asks what she chose to keep from that factory floor, and what she let stand only where nothing had been before.