Lina Bo Bardi, born Achillina Bo (5 December 1914 – 20 March 1992), was an Italian-born Brazilian modernist architect. A prolific architect and designer, she devoted her working life, most of it spent in Brazil, to promoting the social and cultural potential of architecture and design. While she studied under radical Italian architects, she quickly became intrigued with Brazilian vernacular design and how it could influence a modern Brazilian architecture. During her lifetime it was difficult to be accepted among the local Brazilian architects, because she was both a "foreigner" and a woman.
She is recognizable for the unique style of the many architectural illustrations she created over her lifetime, along with her tendency to leave poignant notes to herself. She is also known for her furniture and jewelry designs.Charlotte Burns (1 August 2011), Lina Bo Bardi, the artist’s architect The Art Newspaper. The popularity of her works has increased since 2008, when a 1993 catalog of her works was republished. A number of her product designs are being revived, and exhibitions such as her 1968 exhibition of glass and concrete easels have been recreated.
Early life in Italy Achillina Bo was born on 5 December 1914 in Rome, Italy."Timeline – Lina Bo Bardi", Deutsches Architektur Zentrum, Retrieved 16 August 2014. Lina was the oldest child of Enrico and Giovanna Bo, who later had another daughter named Graziella. Lina had an appreciation for art from a young age. When she decided on becoming an architect, her father was not in total support of her decision. In 1939, she graduated from the Rome College of Architecture at the age of 25 with her final piece, "The Maternity and Infancy Care Centre". She then moved to Milan to begin working with architect Carlo Pagani in the Studio Bo e Pagani, No 12, Via Gesù. Bo Bardi collaborated (until 1943) with architect and designer Giò Ponti on the magazine Lo Stile – nella casa e nell’arredamento. In 1942, at the age of 28, she opened her own architectural studio on Via Gesù, but the lack of work during wartime soon led Bardi to take up illustration for newspapers and magazines such as Stile, Grazia, Belleza, Tempo, Vetrina and Illustrazione Italiana. Her office was destroyed by an aerial bombing in 1943. From 1944–5 Bardi was the Deputy Director of Domus magazine.da Costa Meyer, Esther. "After the Flood", Harvard Design Magazine, Retrieved 16 August 2014.
The event prompted her deeper involvement in the Italian Communist Party. In 1945, Domus commissioned Bo Bardi to travel around Italy with Carlo Pagani and photographer Federico Patellani to document and evaluate the situation of the destroyed country. Bo Bardi, Pagani and Bruno Zevi established the weekly magazine A – Attualità, Architettura, Abitazione, Arte in Milan (A Cultura della Vita).Zeuler Lima. "Preservation as Conservation: The Work of Lina Bo Bardi", Columbia University School of Architecture, Retrieved 16 August 2014. She also collaborated on the daily newspaper Milano Sera, directed by Elio Vittorini. Bo Bardi took part in the First National Meeting for Reconstruction in Milan, alerting people to the indifference of public opinion on the subject, which for her covered both the physical and moral reconstruction of the country.
In 1946, Bo Bardi moved to Rome and married the art critic and journalist Pietro Maria Bardi.
Career in Brazil
In October 1946 Bo Bardi and her husband traveled to South America. Because they had participated in the Italian resistance movement, they had found life in post-war Italy difficult. In Rio, they were received by the IAB (Institute of Brazilian Architects). Bardi quickly re-established her practice in Brazil, a country which had a profound effect on her creative thinking. She and her husband co-founded the influential art magazine Habitat. The magazine's title referenced Bardi's conceptualization of the ideal interior as a "habitat" designed to maximize human potential.
In 1947, Assis Chateaubriand invited Pietro Maria Bardi to establish and run a Museum of Art. São Paulo was chosen as the location despite Bo Bardi's preference for Rio de Janeiro. MASP (the São Paulo Museum of Art) was established on 2 October, with temporary offices on the second floor of the headquarters of the Diários Associados on Rua Sete de Abril. Working with Pietro Maria Bardi, Bo Bardi designed the conversion of several floors of the building into a museum; early sketches evoke the facade of the 1939 MoMA building by Philip L. Goodwin and Edward Durell Stone, but alterations were ultimately limited to the interior. She also designed the new headquarters for the Diários Associados on Rua Álvaro de Carvalho, São Paulo, and designed jewelry using Brazilian gemstones. In addition, soon after arriving in Brazil, Bardi began designing their home in Morumbi, a part of the virgin forest in the southern part of São Paulo.
In 1948, the Studio d’Arte Palma was established on the 18th floor of a building by Polish architect Lucjan Korngold (N˚ 66 Praça Bráulio Gomes, São Paulo), bringing Pietro Maria Bardi, Bo Bardi, Giancarlo Palanti (until 1951) and Valeria Piacentini Cirell (responsible for the antiquarian section) together.
In 1950, Bo Bardi and fellow Italian immigrant Giancarlo Palanti re-designed the MASP museum space in the Diários Associados building, shifting away from Beaux-Arts-style interiors with paintings backed by curtained walls, towards exhibition design rooted in interwar avant-garde artistic practices such as the work of El Lissitzky, the Deutscher Werkbund, and Franco Albini.
Bo Bardi became a naturalized Brazilian citizen in 1951, the same year she completed her first built work, her own "Glass House" in the new neighborhood of Morumbi. Italian rationalism shaped this first work, but because she was immersed in Brazilian culture, her creative thinking began to become more expressive.
In 1955 Bo Bardi became a lecturer for the Architecture and Urbanism Faculty at the University of São Paulo. She wrote and submitted the manuscript, "Contribuição Propedêutica ao Ensino da Teoria da Arquitetura" (Propaedeutic Contribution to the Teaching of Architecture Theory) to the school in 1957, hoping to win a permanent position there.
In 1959, Bo Bardi collaborated with theater director Martim Gonçalves to create the exhibition Bahia in Ibirapuera, which exhibited artworks, craft objects, music, and images from the Brazilian state of Bahia in the heart of the V São Paulo Bienal. This exhibition was a crucial transitional design between the museology of the earlier MASP in the Diários Associados building and the crystal easels of the later MASP on Avenida Pompéia.
In 1977 Bo Bardi designed the SESC Pompéia Factory, which was called a "leisure center" instead of a sports and cultural center by Bo Bardi because she felt that the word culture was too weighty, and this place should be somewhere to relax and find enjoyment. The design of SESC Pompéia prioritized labor and craftmanship over expensive materials because Bo Bardi believed architects should do their best to create jobs for craftsmen and laborers.
In 1989, at the age of 74, Bo Bardi was honored with the first exhibition of her work at the University of São Paulo."Lina Bo Bardi and the Architecture of Everyday Culture", Places Journal, Retrieved 5 April 2015.
Bo Bardi also created jewelry, costume, and set designs.
Bo Bardi died at the Casa de Vidro on 20 March 1992. When she died she left designs for a new São Paulo City Hall and a Cultural Centre for Vera Cruz.
Early Projects In August 1940 Bo Bardi partnered with Carlo Pagani in an unbuilt project titled 'Casa sul mare di Sicilia' in a special issue of the magazine Domus. It is one of the first projects that Bo Bardi worked on – a utopian project whose representations indicate a way of proceedings that coagulates theory and imagination conceived as indissoluble relationship of 'doing'." In addition the project had "'unconventional' drawings of the project, plans, perspectives and perspective section, indicating a very personal way in using of graphic language". The project was a design for a Mediterranean house integrated into the landscape and built using an abundance of historical and cultural imaginary.
Bo Bardi's very particular representational style likely originated through an artistic style inspired from her father Enricao Bo, who was in many trades but was an anarchist with an adventurous life which influenced many of the unique graphical drawings of her 'Casa sul mare di Sicilia'.
Major Projects
The Glass House
In 1951 Bo Bardi designed the "Casa de Vidro" (“Glass House”) to live with her husband in what was then the remnants of the Mata Atlantica, the original rain forest surrounding São Paulo. She appreciated the site's rugged landscape, which aligned with many of her written works praising rural architecture. The structure is an early example of reinforced concrete in domestic architecture. Located on a 7,000-square-metre plot of land, it was one of the first three residences in the Morumbi neighborhood, along with Oswaldo Bratke's studio house and his project for Oscar and Maria Luisa Americano. The area is now a wealthy suburb; a more domesticated version of the rain forest has re-established itself around the house, concealing it from view.
In addition to being her first built project, this building was also Bo Bardi's first attempt at finding a Brazilian language for the Italian modernism that she had been trained in. She also drew from other American modernist works, such as Mies van der Rohe's Farnsworth House and Case Study House No. 8 by Charles and Ray Eames, both of which were widely publicized at the time. It also could have been influenced by Bernard Rudofsky's courtyard houses featured in the Brazil Builds exposition (1940–1942). However, she wanted to contextualize this modernism into the fabric of Brazil. Rather than copying the local forms, she hoped to incorporate the ideas behind them into the design in a way that was modern, and she celebrated the local environment.
The main part of the house is horizontal between thin reinforced concrete slabs with slender circular columns. The columns are pilotis, which allows the landscape to flow under the building. Large panels of glass combined with a sense of the structure hovering over the ground contributed to the "Glass House" name. Inside, the main living area is almost completely open, except for a courtyard that allows the trees in the garden below to grow up into the heart of the house. In the house, there are zones allocated to different functions- a dining room, a library, and a sitting area around the freestanding fireplace- but all are unified by the forest views through the glass. In theory, the glass panels slide open horizontally, but there is no balcony to encourage people to go outside.
The living area is only half of the house. The other half sits on solid ground at the top of the hill, on the north side of the living room. A row of bedrooms face a narrow courtyard, on the other side of which is the blank wall of the staff wing. Only the kitchen crosses the divide – a territory shared by servants and mistress, and equipped with a variety of well-designed labor-saving devices.
The house would become a model for the developer's campaign to sell the remaining lots in the Morumbi. The slogan of "Architecture and Nature" echoed the major themes of Bo Bardi's work.
Related pages: Architectural Drawings, Travel Notebook, Harvard Design Magazine: After the Flood
The São Paulo Museum of Art