Lota de Macedo Soares

In this Portuguese name, the first or maternal family name is Costallat and the second or paternal family name is Macedo Soares.

Lota de Macedo Soares
Born	Maria Carlota Costallat de Macedo Soares (1910-03-16)16 March 1910 Paris, France
Died	25 September 1967(1967-09-25) (aged 57) New York City, New York, U.S.
Nationality	Brazilian
Occupation	Architect

Maria Carlota "Lota" Costallat de Macedo Soares (16 March 1910 – 25 September 1967) was a well-connected Brazilian woman who became a well-known landscape designer and architect. Despite not having a degree in either area, she was invited by governor Carlos Lacerda to design and oversee the construction of Flamengo Park in Rio de Janeiro. She was born in Paris, France into a prominent political family from Rio de Janeiro.

Biography

Lota, as she was known, had a relationship with the American poet Elizabeth Bishop from 1951 to 1967. Bishop dedicated her 1965 volume of poems Questions of Travel to her. Their relationship is depicted in the Brazilian film Reaching for the Moon, based on the book Flores Raras e Banalíssimas (in English, Rare and Commonplace Flowers), by Carmen Lucia de Oliveira, as well as in the book The More I Owe You, by American author Michael Sledge.

In 1967, after Soares had been through a period of extensive hospitalization for a nervous breakdown, she joined Bishop in New York City. The same day she arrived in New York, 19 September 1967, Soares took an overdose of tranquilizers. It is believed that problems with her work and her failing relationship with Bishop were what led to her suicide. She died several days later.

Tribute

On March 16, 2017, Google celebrated her 107th birthday with a Google Doodle.

See also

• Flamengo Park
• Elizabeth Bishop

Further reading

• Lloyd Schwartz, "Elizabeth Bishop and Brazil," The New Yorker, September 30, 1991
• Brett Millier, Elizabeth Bishop: Life and the Memory of It, University of California Press, 1995
• Elizabeth Bishop, One Art: Letters. Ed. Robert Giroux (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1994).
• Carmen L. Oliveira, Rare and Commonplace Flowers: The Story of Elizabeth Bishop and Lota de Macedo Soares, translated by Neil K. Besner, (Rutgers University Press, 2002); reviewed by Emily Nussbaum [1]
• Schuma Schumacher and Érico Vital Brasil, eds. Dicionário Mulheres do Brasil (Rio de Janeiro: Jorge Zahar Editora, 2000), pp. 335–336.
• Michael Sledge, "The More I Owe You." (Berkeley: Counterpoint Press, 2010).