Lina Bo Bardi

Lina Bo Bardi (Born Achillina Bo on December 5, 1914 in Rome, Italy — Died March 20, 1992 in São Paulo) was a Brazilian modernist architect born in Italy.

After graduating from the Rome School of Architecture in 1939 at the age of 25, she began her career in the office of Giò Ponti in Milan where she was very successful despite the war and gained a vast amount of knowledge about furniture, industrial design, and architecture through her years of experience. She put this experience to use when she opened her own office. However, she didn’t receive many commissions before her office was destroyed by an aerial bombing in 1943. The event prompted her deeper involvement in the Italian Communist Party. She spent the years following the war documenting destruction across Italy, participating in the National Congress for Reconstruction. She also founded a weekly magazine, A Cultura della Vita, with Bruno Zevi, and became a deputy director of Domus in 1946 and contributed articles and illustrations.

Career in Brazil

The São Paulo Museum of Art (MASP), a well known work of Lina Bo Bardi

In 1946 Bo Bardi moved with her husband to Brazil, a country which had a profound effect on her creative thinking. She became a naturalized citizen in 1951, the same year she completed her first built work, her own "Glass House" in the new neighborhood of Morumbi. Here, the Italian rationalism shaped this first work, but immersed in Brazilian culture her creative thinking began to become more expressive.

"The Glass House"

Lina designed the “Glass House” for her and her husband in what was then the remnants of the Mata Atlantica, the original rain forest surrounding São Paulo. The area is now the wealthy suburb of Morumbi but a more domesticated version of the rain forest has since re-established itself around the house, concealing it from view. 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. 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 São Paulo Museum of Art

Lina became famous for the ample spaces she sought to construct. The São Paulo Museum of Art, of which her husband Pietro Maria Bardi was curator, was built to her basic design. And when she died she left designs for a new São Paulo City Hall and a Cultural Centre for Vera Cruz.

References

• Biography at the Instituto Lina Bo e Pietro M. Bardi
• Meyer, Esther da Costa. (Winter/Spring 2002) "After the Flood". Harvard Design Magazine. No. 16
• Profile of Bardi for Exhibition at Museum of Design, Zurich
• Profile of Bardi for Exhibition at Civic Museums of Venice
• Davies, Colin. Key Houses Of The Twentieth Century, Plans, Sections And Elevations. W W Norton & Co Inc, 2007.