I was looking for a simple architecture, one that could immediately communicate that which in the past was known as “monumental,” that is, in the sense of the “collective,” of “Civic Dignity.”
Lina Bo Bardi’s contributions to modern architecture and design embrace popular culture, folk art, and crafts. Her far-ranging objects and spaces connect to the materials and rituals of daily life. She famously called the hammocks used on river boats in northern Brazil “one of the most perfect instruments of repose,” and based her Tripé de Ferro chair after their design. As a young architect in Rome and Milan, Bo Bardi worked with architects and designers such as Gio Ponti, Carlo Pagani, and Bruno Zevi, writing and editing for Lo Stile, Domus, and A-Attualitá, Architettura, Abitazione, Arte (A Cultura della Vita). These publications were the vehicle for her initial reflections on the alienation brought about by industrialization and the loss of everyday and folk expressions. After migrating to Brazil in the aftermath of World War II, Bo Bardi would make these concerns the backbone of her practice as an architect, designer, editor, writer, exhibition-maker, theorist, educator, and cultural practitioner.
In Brazil, Bo Bardi traveled throughout the country studying Indigenous, ancestral, rural, and vernacular expressions and mapping them through exhibitions and the pages of Habitat, a magazine she edited with her husband, Pietro Maria Bardi, in the 1950s. During this time, Bo Bardi’s architectural and design language also underwent a radical transformation informed by her travels. The Casa Valeria Cirell (1959) incorporated informal elements, materials, and techniques such as tiled eaves, wooden pillars, recycled elements inlaid into the outer cement, and pebble walls, among others. Bo Bardi crafted a constructive language very much of her time, using contemporary industrial materials such as reinforced concrete as a manifestation of austerity, durability, and hardiness that echoed the lessons learned from vernacular architectures. She would describe it as a “poor architecture,” a process of simplification “opting for direct, raw solutions.”
Bo Bardi’s designs for MASP (concluded in 1968) and SESC Pompéia (constructed between 1977 and 1986) exemplify the architect’s “direct, raw solutions” and make an ideological statement against what she perceived as a bourgeois idea of what a museum should look like. MASP sits in the middle of Avenida Paulista in São Paulo, one of the city’s main thoroughfares and its financial center. In response to the mandate to allow a view of the city from the public Trianon Park, Bo Bardi hung the main building from two prestressed beams connected and supported by four pillars, creating a clear span of more than 260 feet that also incorporated the plaza, street, and public space below.
The SESC Pompéia, on a former factory site, is considered by many to be her gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art), and her most ambitious project. She designed the buildings and different facilities (sports courts, swimming pool, workshop spaces, theaters, cafeteria, exhibition spaces, libraries, etc.); created the furniture, workers’ uniforms, cafeteria menus; and even contributed several exhibitions.
The designs for the exhibition galleries at each of these institutions subvert traditional conventions of display: at MASP, glass easels for artwork create a nonlinear journey through the space that does away with chronology and other art-historical methods for classifying art; at SESC Pompéia, the exhibition space is open to the outdoors, with no climate control and the integration of natural elements such as a “creek” and a “hearth.”
Bo Bardi’s conception of architecture strives to impart the affective (the solidarity of being together) and the useful (fostering relations between people, objects, and ideas). These goals are the pillars of her practice within the multiple fields with which she engaged. Her tireless quest sought to highlight other forms of knowledge and creation that had long been denied a place in “high culture” and fine-art museums.
Julieta González, independent scholar, 2024
Note: opening quote is from Lina Bo Bardi, Museu de Arte de Sao Paulo, in Museu de Arte de São Paulo, Instituto Lina Bo e P.M. Bardi, Editorial Blau, São Paulo: 1997.
