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. The popularity of her works has increased since 2008, when a 1993 catalog of her works was republished.
Early life in Italy
Achillina Bo was born on 5 December 1914 in Rome, Italy. Lina was the oldest child of Enrico and Giovanna Bo, who later had another daughter named Graziella. 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. 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. 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.
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.
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. 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.
Bo Bardi also created jewelry, costume, and set designs. 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
thumb|Casa de Vidro (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. 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 Bardis became involved with the Museum after meeting the Brazilian journalist and diplomat Assis Chateaubriand. concrete columns connected by two concrete beam running along the length of the building, with 2 floors of gallery above and below the ground floor. The open midsection of the building left the plaza open to Avenida Paulista, São Paulo's main financial and cultural avenue, and left the site unobstructed to the views of the lower-lying parts of the city, which was one of the conditions given by the local legislation when Bo Bardi received the commission for this project
Paintings were hung on individual sheets of glass set in rough-hewn concrete blocks – called "crystal easels" – and arranged in a rough grid in the MASP Pinacoteca. Bo Bardi intended to create an experience within the art gallery that would be unexpected and almost uncomfortable, by presenting the artwork in a non-chronological order in the open plan of each floor to create dissonance between the preconceived understanding of order and what is presented.
Solar do Unhão
Solar do Unhão is Salvador's main cultural center. It was founded by Lina Bo Bardi after an invitation by the governor of Bahia to direct a new art museum in the North East of Brazil. Bo Bardi wanted this museum to show primitive art from the North East of Brazil, as well as the practical nature of their designs. The design of the museum reflects the culture in Salvador, but also the practicality and beauty of the region. Bo Bardi was commissioned to restore the sugar mill into a museum of modern art. The construction lasted from 1959–1963. Completed in several stages between 1977 and 1986, Bo Bardi combined the existing structure with additions of her own design. The building currently houses many activities rooms, including: theatres, gymnasiums, a swimming pool, snack bars, leisure areas, restaurants, galleries, and workshops. The building was designed for the theatre group with the same name whom were an important part of the Tropicalia movement of the late 1960s. Tropicalia strived for change and a way for Brazil to escape its colonial past. They used theater to try and understand their Brazilian heritage. Bo Bardi designed the new space almost completely out of painted scaffolding. The design references the construction of sets in a theatre space. The theatre does not have conventional seats, which leads to bad sight lines. Architectural critiques have stated that this does not take away from the theatre experience but enhances it with intensity. The heavy wooden seats are designed in a circle at center stage and the stage is very narrow. Initially, the theatre was designed for experimental director, Zé Celso, who has said that the idea of the space came to him in an acid trip. The theatre is often used by experimental performers who work around the space. The design of the theatre is meant to make the viewer feel as though they are engaged with the act on the stage. In 2012, Italian Furniture brand Arper recreated 500 pieces of the limited edition Bowl Chair. Arper engaged in intensive dialogues with the Institute Lina Bo e P.M. Bardi evaluating the original iterations for size, interior structure, upholstery detailing – down to the quality and size of the stitching – and softness of the seat. Every detail, down to the small leather covers placed around the round steel frame of the chair to hold it in place, was carefully reinterpreted. Arper explored different modes of interpretation of color for this touchstone of Brazilian modernist design.
Later designs, such as her 1967 Cadeira Beira de Estrada (Roadside Chair), inspired by the vernacular designs she observed during her travels in the northeast of Brazil, embody an unofficial aesthetic with simplicity of design and reduction and rawness of material. She often used plywood and native Brazilian woods in her designs. Bardi wanted each object to display its own "natural logic."
Drawings
Bo Bardi produced more than six thousand drawings most of which are stored in her personal archives in the house she designed for herself and her husband in São Paulo. She used drawing as a primary language for communicating her thoughts and ideas to the rest of the world. Most of her drawings are not isolated events as they correlate and exist in a wide range of scales, patterns, relationships, and themes. Bo Bardi died in 1992 in Sao Paulo, Brazil.
Over the past years, numerous artists and architects including Gilbert & George, Cildo Meireles, Isaac Julien, Cristina Iglesias, Norman Foster, Olafur Eliasson, and Adrián Villar Rojas have created works in homage to Lina Bo Bardi. In 2013, curator Hans Ulrich Obrist mounted the exhibition “The Insides are on the Outside”, set at the Casa de Vidro and at SESC Pompeia. Gilbert & George spent a day at the Glass House as living sculptures, documenting the results with postcards to be distributed to visitors.
In 2014, a Google Doodle commemorated her 100th birthday.
In 2015, The Guardian elected Lina Bo Bardi's Teatro Oficina (1991) as the best theatre in the world.
In 2018, Nilufar Gallery, in collaboration with Space Caviar, supported by Instituto Bardi Casa de Vidro, presented the largest collection of Lina’s furniture ever brought together, at Fuorisalone Milan Design Week.
From 5 October 2018 - 13 January 2019, the Fundación Juan March Madrid exhibited Lina Bo Bardi. Tupí or not tupí. Brazil (1946-1992). It was the first exhibit of her work in Spain.
Lina Bo Bardi was portrayed by Fernanda Montenegro and Fernanda Torres in the 2020 Isaac Julien's documentary film Lina Bo Bardi – A Marvelous Entanglement.
Publications
- Lina Bo Bardi – The Poetry of Concrete. Catalogue of the exhibition at the Tchoban Foundation. Museum for Architectural Drawing, Berlin
Selected architectural projects
- Casa de Vidro (The Glass House), 1951: Bo Bardi's residence
- Bardi's Bowl, 1951: Chair
- Solar do Unhão, 1959: sugar mill converted to a craft museum in Bahia
- Museu de Arte de São Paulo (São Paulo Museum of Art), 1968
- Caipiras, Capiaus: Pau a Pique (Exhibition), 1984