Lina: The most beloved architect in Brazil

Lina Bo Bardi

“When we design, even as a student, it is important that a building serves a purpose and that it has the connotation of use. It is necessary that the work does not fall from the sky over its inhabitants, but rather expresses a need.” In conclusion, she said, “You should always look for the ideal, decent object, which could also be defined by the old term ‘beauty.” - Lina Bo Bardi, 1988

Chair designed for St Mary of the Angels Chapel (1978)

Brief
Lina Bo Bardi (December 4, 1914 – March 20, 1992) was one of the most important and expressive architects of 20th century Brazilian architecture. She studied Brazilian culture from an anthropological perspective and was particularly interested in the convergence of art and popular tradition.

Only in her latter years had Bo Bardi begun to receive recognition for her long and prolific career as a designer. At the age of 74, Bo Bardi was honoured her first exhibition at Universidade de São Paulo — the same school that, three decades earlier, had denied her a permanent teaching position.

Architectural Projects 

St Mary of the Angels Chapel (1978)

Given a limited budget, this chapel was designed alongside geometrical principles to give a simple yet exquisite interior and lighting effects. The floor plan consists of a square with its 2 opposites corners taken to make the altar and the entrance

Sketch of the chapel's floor plan

The Glass House (1951)

Bo Bardi's first architectural project. The glass house was built for herself and her husband,  and raised on stilts above a sloping site on the edge of the city. The furniture used here was mostly designed by her.

The São Paulo Museum of Art (1957-1968)

A concrete and glass structure with its main body supported by two lateral beams over a 74 meters freestanding space, considered a landmark of the city and a main symbol of modern Brazilian architecture. Bo Bardi believed that museum should not be a graveyard for human heritage, hence she incorporated qualities of transparency, lightness and suspension into the design of this museum.

Main Gallery with art pieces suspending throughout the space, details have been purposely hidden on the back of the glass-and-concrete easel, creating a non-linear exhibition.

SESC Pompéia (1977-1986)

SESC is a social and cultural centre formed out of an old drum factory. It houses football, swimming, theatre, dance and art. Here Bo Bardi's first move was to argue that the old factory should not be demolished, as had been planned, on the grounds that it was already informally colonised by some of the uses – such as barbecues and puppet theatres – which the new centre was intended to serve. To Bo Bardi, it was clear that people is the centre of this project. After the conctruction was complete, she continued to contribute, with the invention and design of staff uniform, store interior, logo etc.

List of chairs designed by Lina Bo Bardi (by watarium)

Commentary by Rowan Moore

...It's an old story, the opposition between an architect's vision and the wishes of the users of buildings. It is immortalised in Ayn Rand's book The Fountainhead and the subsequent Gary Cooper movie, in which the preposterous architect hero blows up a social housing project built to a compromised version of his designs, rather than let this aesthetic affront stand. On the other hand, attempts to build "what people want" have a way of ending up being bland and uninspiring. They succeed largely in not making what people don't want.
The blindingly obvious truth is surely that both have value, the skill and imagination of architects and the experiences and wishes of the public. Their coming together is likely to involve some friction, but it's worth the effort because it is this encounter that makes architecture worth having. Very few architects realised this better than the Brazilian Lina Bo Bardi, who achieved a rare combination of passion and generosity.

Study sketch of the cloud window used in SESC

More about the architect

Bo Bardi’s writings and designs are insightful and engaging, yet also ambivalent (ambiguous) and idiosyncratic (habitual, characteristic), and they cannot be easily classified into a single framework. Though fewer than 20 of her architectural projects were built, their social and conceptual meaning is deep, broad, and in direct communication with the many other types of design she developed.

Her work was based on experimentation and on the laborious process of developing and materializing programs that nurtured collective life, more than on the desire to produce a coherent professional portfolio. She invited those who read her articles, attended her lectures or experienced the spaces she designed to consider “architecture not as built work, but as possible means to be and to face different situations.” ¹ She strove to produce work that embraced how people live.

Snack Bar Sketch for SESC (1984)

Bo Bardi was loyal more to an emancipating (liberal) concept of modernity than to the abstract, formal language of modern architecture. Her thinking and practice were situated at the intersection of different worldviews: north and south, city and hinterland, privilege and deprivation, modernism and tradition, past and present, abstraction and social realism. She progressed from a hesitant but ambitious early career in Italy to professional and intellectual maturity in Brazil, especially in the Nordeste, where she “learned that beauty, proportions, all these things are not important.” ²

References
http://watarium.co.jp/exhibition/1512_lina/index.html
https://placesjournal.org/article/lina-bo-bardi-and-the-architecture-of-everyday-culture/
http://www.archdaily.com/575429/spotlight-lina-bo-bardi
http://www.designboom.com/architecture/lina-bo-bardi-santa-maria-dos-anjos-chapel-chair-sao-paulo-brazil-01-30-2015/
http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2012/sep/09/lina-bo-bardi-together-review
http://www.dezeen.com/2015/10/29/lina-bo-bardi-glass-easel-revived-exhibition-brazilian-art-sao-paulo-museum-of-art/