THE NON-CONFORMIST: THE ARCHITECTURE OF LINA BO BARDI
ARCHITECTS’ REPUTATIONS are far more fragile than the structures of bricks and mortar—or steel and glass—that they erect, as the ritual of celebrating artistic centennials too often attests. The exhibitions organized to mark the hundredth anniversary of Mies van der Rohe’s birth in 1986, for example, fell on deaf ears, so maligned at that exuberantly postmodern moment was Mies’s rigorous and crystalline modernism. Le Corbusier’s centenary, one year later, delivered a megaretrospective at Paris’s Centre Pompidou and an avalanche of new books but spurred no fresh engagement with his work. The belated reception of design is rarely in line with contemporary sensibilities.
The stars, however, seem to have been perfectly aligned for the recent centennial of the birth of Lina Bo Bardi, who was born in Italy in 1914 and adopted Brazil as her home country in 1946, living and working there until her death in 1992. Her current popularity has reached an apogee that seems nothing short of astonishing, given the relative obscurity in which her work had languished.When Bo Bardi’s half-century-long career in architecture, design, magazine editing, and curating came to an end, she was honored outside Brazil with but a handful of obituaries. Yet, as I write this essay, there are simultaneous shows about Bo Bardi at the Museo Nazionale delle Arti del XXI Secolo in Rome, “Lina Bo Bardi in Italia,” and the Graham Foundation in Chicago, “Lina Bo Bardi: Together,” which was launched three years ago in London and has made nine stops on its way to its present venue. Several of Bo Bardi’s most significant designs are featured, too, in the current show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, “Latin America in Construction: Architecture 1955–1980” (which I organized with Jorge Francisco Liernur, Carlos Eduardo Comas, and Patricio del Real), where her projects are part of our larger effort to gather innovative work that can contribute to a broader reconsideration of Latin American architectural history. These exhibitions coincide with a flurry of books and articles on Bo Bardi, including the first monograph on her work in English, Zeuler R. M. de A. Lima’s subtly argued and holistic Lina Bo Bardi (2013).
This tremendous resurgence of interest seems to stem from the acute resonance of Bo Bardi’s work with twenty-first-century concerns. Her career was marked by a progressive embrace of the popular and vernacular as well as by a striking reformulation of the political and aesthetic utopianism of the modern movement. Today, she seems to offer a perfect counterexample to architecture’s increasing disengagement from social responsibility and its relentlessly expanding complicity with consumerism and real estate development.
BO BARDI’S first realized building in Brazil hewed close to modernist precedents. This was the iconic Casa de Vidro (Glass House), which she designed for herself and her husband, the art dealer, critic, and impresario Pietro Maria Bardi (1900–1999) in São Paulo in 1951. The building, perched atop a hill overlooking the city center from across the river, was in taut dialogue with Italian postwar modernism, as well as with several contemporary glass houses by Mies, Philip Johnson, and Oscar Niemeyer, respectively. But by the end of the decade she had radically retooled the quintessentially modernist typology of the glass box, transforming it into an urban device for engaging with the public life of the street. This shift is revealed by her design for São Paulo’s new art museum, the Museu de Arte (MASP)—conceived in 1957 although not built until 1968—founded by her husband and the powerful newspaper magnate and cultural patron Assis Chateaubriand. The building was situated on an intensely urban site on the Avenida Paulista, the main thoroughfare in the neighborhood that was quickly becoming the epicenter of São Paulo’s transformation into Brazil’s metropolis of trade and finance. Here, Bo Bardi deployed massive concrete piers and heroic trusses to hoist a double-story glazed rectangular box high above the sidewalk, a dramatic modernist gesture in unmistakable rivalry with Mies’s combination of broad spans and suspended transparent volumes. But Bo Bardi was not aiming to segregate her glass box, or the art it contained, from daily urban experience; the raised galleries were anchored by a second building layered into a hillside behind. The roof of this structure created an ample plaza that the architect visualized in a series of powerful collages and drawings as a changing setting for everything from outdoor sculpture exhibitions to circuses for children. Her design offered a response to modernism in which the spontaneous was mixed with the solemn, the everyday with the exalted.
This response continued to develop as Bo Bardi began working in Brazil’s northeast in the late 1950s and early ’60s, not only as an architect but also as a museum director, stage designer, and curator. Here she embraced the popular arts of native Brazilians and of the vibrant Afro-Brazilian culture of Bahia and began to develop a building style based as much on thoughtful reconsideration of existing context as on new construction. The museum she designed and helped to found in the state capital of Salvador, the Museu de Arte Moderna da Bahia (MAM-BA, 1963), for example, was crafted from a complex of Portuguese colonial buildings. Bo Bardi sensitively updated these structures, carving out public patios and inserting new connections between previously isolated spaces, most dramatically placing a staircase in the main manor house, which turned the structure’s forgotten attic into a dramatic exhibition space. This intervention was itself a miniature architecture, a spiral of ceremonial breadth, freestanding so as to exert no pressure on the existing walls—a monument to craft and yet as technically complex as her suspended glass box in São Paulo.
For the remainder of her career, Bo Bardi continued to develop this dialogue between modern technique and vernacular tradition in her architectural practice, which increasingly involved participation, sensitivity to historic surroundings, and a gentle breaking of social barriers. Hers was not the career of a typical modernist master like Mies, dedicated to the singular pursuit of a universal solution. Rather, Bo Bardi was engaged in an ever-evolving and highly complex exploration of architecture as a practice of contingencies, whether social, cultural, or historical. “‘Shackles’ must be cast off,” she wrote, “but the past and all its history must not be just thrown out too. The past should be seen as a historical present that is still alive, posing the task of forging a different ‘real’ present time. What is needed is not the specialist’s in-depth knowledge, but an ability to understand the past historically and distinguish whatever will be useful for new situations today.”
Today, a rising interest in so-called tactical urbanism, participatory design, and “learning from the favela” has created a new climate of receptiveness for Bo Bardi’s approach. Increasingly, she is embraced as a forerunner, even a spiritual mother, by young architects around the world pursuing alternative practices against the grain of the commercial forces that drive rapid urban growth on every continent. Such projects work modestly with the commonplace, seeking to claim public space for everyday citizens through nonheroic means. These practices celebrate the ad hoc, new relationships between user and designer, ingenious responses to diminished means, and the resistance of the local to the overarching forces of globalization.
INDEED, there is much to be learned from Bo Bardi. But despite all this, I worry that she may be well on her way to becoming the Frida Kahlo of architecture: a figure so universally adored that productive critical engagement with her work risks being eclipsed by her newfound popularity. Indeed, a future art historian might identify our present moment as the precise point when Bo Bardi became not only current but a currency of exchange. She has become a frequent presence in both lifestyle magazines and the international art world. Her furniture designs, once almost unknown, are now so popular that forgeries are starting to appear on the market. Architects, too, seem eager to broadcast their affinity with her work: In 2010, Kazuyo Sejima, the Japanese master of vitreous form, created an installation celebrating Bo Bardi for the Venice Architecture Biennale, and two years later she contributed one of the thirty-odd homages commissioned for “the insides are on the outside | o interior está no exterior,” a 2012 exhibition for which curator Hans Ulrich Obrist invited an international array of artists and architects (including such figures as Dan Graham, Dominique González-Foerster, and Rem Koolhaas) to exhibit works or create interventions in the Bardis’ home. Lina, as she is now affectionately known by a growing number of fans (not limited to the several hundred who have friended her since “she” launched “her” page on Facebook last year) has become something of a household name.
It might seem churlish to express some reservations about this craze. What’s not to praise about the rediscovery of one of the great talents of twentieth-century architecture and design, particularly when her work offers something for which the current architectural discourse feels so much hunger? One danger is that the seemingly unquenchable thirst for more Bo Bardi hagiography will isolate her from the very contexts and issues with which she grappled—and that have made her work so rich as a historical subject as well as a contemporary springboard. The reception of major artistic careers is often marked by a tension between academic assessments of an important body of work and the catalytic role that same oeuvre serves in a contemporary context, but what is most worrisome is the uncritical merging of the two. Such a facile convergence was spelled out in the enigmatic subtitle of the monumental catalogue that accompanied Bo Bardi’s centennial exhibition at Munich’s Architekturmuseum in 2014–15: “Lina Bo Bardi 100: Brasiliens alternativer Weg in die Moderne” (Lina Bo Bardi 100: Brazil’s Alternative Path to Modernism). What are we to make of this reductive branding of a complex career, which hints that Bo Bardi was somehow emblematic of Brazilian exceptionalism? More nuanced scholarship suggests that she was in many ways a marginalized and controversial figure in Brazilian architecture. In the pages of that very catalogue, one of the leading scholars of Bo Bardi’s work, Renato Anelli, constructs an insightful analysis of the architect’s contentious relationship to the politics of Brazil’s state-sponsored development to demonstrate that her status was often that of an outsider.
Bo Bardi’s entire career was marked by resistance to the prevailing trends she encountered, whether architectural or political. As a rare female architect coming of age in Fascist Italy, she worked for several progressive design magazines, including Domus, which brought her into close contact with the Italian Communist Party; she and her husband chose to leave the country in the wake of the Christian Democratic victory in the first postwar elections. After settling in Brazil, Bo Bardi lost no time in challenging the architectural status quo of her new homeland. She was eager, along with others in São Paulo in the ’50s, to question what appeared to be the ascendancy of the Rio de Janeiro, or “Carioca,” school. This style was epitomized by the designs of Niemeyer and had by then already been celebrated internationally by MoMA’s exhibition “Brazil Builds”of 1943. Niemeyer believed that the technical innovations of modernism were a license for total artistic freedom. His work was characterized by great curving and swelling forms, meandering floor plans, and highly expressive cantilevers; the structures he designed fit their social functions with the looseness of clothing appropriate to a hot climate. In response to the Cariocas’ dominance, Bo Bardi and her husband founded an influential new magazine, Habitat, in 1950, through which they sought to stimulate discussion about alternative approaches. And by creating Habitat, the Bardis played an indirect role in provoking what was surely the era’s most virulent attack on Niemeyer: the prominent Swiss architect and critic Max Bill’s infamous—and vaguely racist—condemnation, in a public lecture that was also published in the British Architectural Review in 1954. After a visit to Brazil, Bill reported, “I saw some shocking things, modern architecture sunk to the depths, a riot of anti-social waste, lacking any sense of responsibility. . . . Here is utter anarchy in building, jungle growth in the worst sense. . . . One is baffled to account for such barbarism as this in a country . . . where a journal like Habitat is published and where there is a biennial exhibition of architecture.” This proxy battle cry was all the more remarkable for having been issued on the eve of Niemeyer’s coronation as the form giver of president Juscelino’s Kubitschek’s great campaign to position Brazilian architecture and urban planning on the world stage, which culminated in the media-ready unveiling of the new capital of Brasília in 1960.
During the decades of Brazil’s military dictatorship, Bo Bardi built less frequently, but she began to engage more directly with vernacular building materials and methods, and to base her designs in part on consultation with local residents. One of her unsung masterpieces from this era is the Igreja Espírito Santo do Cerrado (Church of the Holy Spirit of Cerrado) in Uberlândia of 1982, which uses local timber and cloth alongside concrete, a material that was by then already as characteristic of the favela as of grandiose state developments. Around the time of democracy’s resurgence, she returned to Salvador to work with the local government on projects for the restoration and reinvigoration of the colonial city’s historic fabric, notably in the creation of a house of African culture, the Casa do Benin, 1988. Here, concrete columns were encased in vernacular weavings, suggesting a respect for multiple transatlantic passages of influence: not only the high culture and technology of European modernism but also African craft and beliefs. Her great masterpiece—the conversion of a barrel factory into a multiuse complex that would become the most programmatically and formally complex project of her career—also dates from this era. Her client was the Serviço Social do Comércio (SESC), an institution founded by Brazilian trade leaders in 1946 to provide social services. Bo Bardi inserted a staggering range of new functions into the existing factory buildings, ranging from a restaurant to a library; created an impromptu boardwalk over an existing stream bed to allow sunbathing in the midst of the city; and constructed a heroic Brutalist tower of indoor sports facilities that became an urban beacon, its skin pierced by windows literally punched roughly into the concrete frame that allow expansive views over the city. Combining functions for all ages and classes, Bo Bardi created an urban crucible of gentle yet enduring power.
FORTUNATELY, the reevaluation of Bo Bardi in Brazil itself seems poised to explore and elucidate this complex practice. The probing, if modest, exhibition curated and designed by the architect Marcelo Ferraz, her longtime collaborator, in the SESC Pompeia last year was exemplary. “A Arquitetura Política de Lina Bo Bardi” (The Political Architecture of Lina Bo Bardi) offered a complex reading of the political stakes of her practice, emphasizing her increasingly activist role in crafting what she called “uma arquitetura pobre,” a concept as much in dialogue with her concerns for Brazil’s disenfranchised masses as it was with postwar Italian art practices. At the Museu da Casa Brasileira in São Paulo, curator Giancarlo Latorraca explored Bo Bardi’s radical merging of architecture and curating in “Maneiras de Expor: Arquitetura Expositiva de Lina Bo Bardi” (Ways of Showing: The Exhibition Architecture of Lina Bo Bardi). Her aim, she wrote in 1950, was to “build an atmosphere, a behavior capable of creating in the visitor a mental form adapted to the comprehension of artworks, and in this respect no distinction is made between old and modern artworks. For the same reason, artworks are not arranged in chronological order but almost deliberately shown in a way that produces shock and stirs reactions of inquisitiveness and investigation.” It is exactly in this spirit that exhibitions should integrate the work of Bo Bardi herself into the ongoing project of reevaluating twentieth-century Brazilian architecture.
Considering Bo Bardi’s work in relation to that of colleagues around the region can reanimate the conversations she had with others and help us understand both the context in which she worked and the influence of her practice. Clorindo Testa, Francisco Bullrich, and Alicia Cazzaniga’s Biblioteca Nacional Mariano Moreno in Buenos Aires of 1992 is in clear dialogue with Bo Bardi’s great MASP, using a similar strategy for forging new relationships between cultural institution and public space. The library likewise lifts its functions above-ground to allow a public park to continue uninterrupted toward the great view of the Río de la Plata, allowing playful functions and spontaneous encounters to take place so that the library is at once part of the city and above it. Even more striking is the relationship between Bo Bardi’s visionary 1975–76 studies for a cooperative housing settlement in Camurupim in Propriá and other projects for self-assembled housing based on traditional construction technologies, such as the contemporary Brazilian work by Carlos Nelson Ferreira dos Santos or the prefabricated wattle and daub of Acácio Gil Borsoi. Camurupim was never realized and deserves to be studied anew. It emerged at a moment when architects throughout Latin America were beginning to question the top-down approach of state-sponsored housing, which often encouraged large-scale construction on isolated sites, far from urban centers and employment opportunities. In her project, Bo Bardi characteristically gave equal priority to communal social space and private living space, an approach that also echoed the contemporary experimental housing project known as the Proyecto Experimental de Vivienda (PREVI) in Lima, where small plazas were interspersed with individual dwelling units. (These were among the juxtapositions highlighted by the MoMA exhibition.) Such projects pose a clear challenge to contemporary architectural engagement: How can architecture allow people to construct their own lives rather than simply adapt to what the market provides them? Today, public space is again in need of careful design and vigilant protection; once again, new technologies are best leveraged when they can be combined with inherited ones.
BO BARDI’S time has clearly come, but her status as role model may continue to diverge from ongoing historical reevlauation. She embodies, for example, the very symbol of the heroic female architect, for which so many in the field are understandably eager, especially in the wake of the recent failed effort to persuade the Pritzker Prize organization to share, retroactively, Robert Venturi’s 1991 award with his partner, Denise Scott Brown. But this alignment is partly muddied by Bo Bardi’s final public appearance in 1989, as recounted by Lima. He recalls that at this last lecture, which he himself attended, Bo Bardi announced: “In Brazil, I have always done everything I wanted,” before adding, to everyone’s shock, “I never faced any obstacles, not even as a woman. That’s why I say I am Stalinist and antifeminist.” Similarly, many are pressing today, in the wake of the repeatedly predicted demise of the starchitect, to elevate Bo Bardi to the role of patron saint of a new movement of socially engaged architects. Yet in considering her politics, we need to address not only her arquitetura pobre but the startling social contradictions embedded formally in so many of her projects, beginning with her own Glass House—the project is famous for its inspiring glass front, but its earthbound servants’ quarters behind, designed very much in the tradition of a Portuguese colonial house, are rarely discussed. Bo Bardi’s was no easy position. She would not allow herself to be reduced to predictable clichés and had no fear of bucking any political correctness. To learn from her, we must first learn to see her practice in all its complexities and contradictions, some of which belong to her alone, some of which mirror the tangled political situations she navigated in Mussolini’s Italy and under twenty years of military dictatorship in Brazil.
The key to grasping all this complexity, of course, is Bo Bardi’s buildings themselves. And it is both saddening and deeply ironic to note that even as centennial celebrations have proliferated, Bo Bardi’s modest oeuvre of completed work is—with the exception of the SESC Pompeia, her own house, and the remarkable church in Uberlândia—shockingly neglected. Her late work in Salvador, including the restaurant and bar she built in the cliff-hanging neighborhood of Ladeira da Misericórdia in 1988, lies in ruins. More poignant still is the fact that the two museums she built almost simultaneously—the new building for the MASP and the colonial manor that she converted into the MAM-BA—have been so severely mishandled that the powerful dialogue between architecture and exhibition design each set in motion has been silenced. One of the welcome effects of her recent resurgence has been to elevate Bo Bardi’s unorthodox architectural drawings—mostly deliberately naive bird’s-eye views of her spaces in spontaneous and changing use—to the status of familiar and inspiring images, but it is urgent that the buildings themselves be brought back to something of her original vision. Only then can the dialogues that today’s artists, architects, and historians are so eager to engage in become a meaningful conversation, activating at once the past and the present.
Barry Bergdoll is Meyer Schapiro Professor of art history at Columbia University and a curator in the department of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
