Gender and the Built Environment Database
A Female Role Model from Brazil: Lina Bo Bardi, Architect
Lina Bo Bardi (d. 1992) is one of the outstanding architects and polymaths of the 20th century, who left a hugely important legacy to the world, but whose work and life has never been properly documented and is widely unknown - certainly outside her home country of Brazil.
Drawing for MASP, São Paulo Museum of Art. Archives Instituto Lina Bo e P. M. Bardi, São Paulo, Brazil
Why is this? Bo Bardi is not unique in being a talented woman designer, teacher and an eloquent writer, who was largely overshadowed by her male peers in the period following the end of the Second World War in 1945. War itself had emancipated women, and yet their vital contribution to the reshaping and reconstruction of society and the built environment during subsequent decades - intellectually, creatively and pragmatically engaging with the spirit and ideals of modernism - often seems shadowy besides that of the men who dominate the pages of architectural and social history. One only has to consider the names of other female designers - Charlotte Perriand, Jane Drew, Alison Smithson, and Minette da Silva are just a few - to realise that those of their male associates (Le Corbusier, Maxwell Fry, Peter Smithson, Geoffrey Bawa) are often better known.
In Bo Bardi's case, the big names which fill the spotlight are Lucio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer, whose contribution to the evolution of a modernist architecture in Brazil is immortalised in the capital city of Brasilia. Brasilia not only embodied the goals of architectural modernism in Brazil, but also the whole political project of dragging a radically underdeveloped country into a utopian, progress-led future: an ideal from which Bo Bardi consciously distanced herself. She, by contrast, believed in the necessity of confronting and engaging with the everyday social realities of Brazil, embodied in the struggles of the masses to survive and find enjoyment in life, and this fundamentally underpinned a type of architectural practice which took many different cultural forms over the course of her long career.
Strikingly, where Bo Bardi is mentioned in one potted history of Brazilian modernist architecture and architects, the reference is to ‘his designs' for cultural and recreational facilities which explored a ‘multiplicity of aesthetic solutions'. And yet one is tempted to argue that it is precisely the multiple, eclectic and playfully inventive character of her output which sets her work apart from that of her more hidebound peers and - possibly - betrays her gender. This is not to say that the influence of Gio Ponti, whom she worked for in Milan before the war broke out, and whose office designed across a prolific range - ‘from teacups and chairs, from fashions, that is, clothing, to urban projects.. to organizing the Decorative Arts Triannuals and editing magazines' - was of no significance. As she says, Ponti styled himself "‘the last of the humanists'". But Bo Bardi developed that approach to design and production as an all-embracing activity in new ways, with a real sense of anthropological engagement in the cultural and social context of her adopted country.
Perhaps it is also something to do with the fact that Bo Bardi's voice speaks from the ‘periphery', that it seems so faint in the ‘centre' place of the global west. But in 1946 she chose to leave war-desecrated Europe with her husband P.M.Bardi, and make Brazil, the place where ‘everything was possible', her ‘country twice times over'. Brazil was ‘an unimaginable country with no middle-class, just two great aristocracies... the land... and the People' (Carvalho Ferraz 1994, p12), and it was here that she found the scope and possibilities to develop a kind of work that perhaps could never have been accepted in Europe.
Bo Bardi's marriage to an extremely well-known Italian journalist and arts promoter was the key reason for her emigration to Brazil, where he was commissioned to set up and run a new art museum. The Museum of Art, Sao Paulo, is one of his wife's most significant buildings. Possibly the idea that her output was dependent on her relationship with her husband and his influence in the elite circles of Brazilian culture is another reason why it is overlooked. But MASP (1957), along with Bo Bardi's other works, is a powerful and dramatic expression of architectural thinking in its own right and must be acclaimed on that basis.
MASP provided a space for art, but above all, a public forum for people. A huge rectangular block, elevated above a ground level ‘belvedere', it houses pictures floating in a vast open space, inspired by the idea of the semi-industrial market buildings of the past, in which the spectator is recast as actor. In the sense that it constitutes a remarkable sculptural volume, or figure, in the city, it owes much to the modernist, rationalist roots that Bo Bardi never disowned. Indeed, she was always indignant at any suggestion that Le Corbusier's ideas for a functionalist, mass-produced architecture were inappropriate to Brazil as an ‘underdeveloped' country, pointing out that they were embraced by the Brazilian establishment (during the 1930s) when Europe was still treating eyeing him with scepticism. MASP built on a concept of rectilinear, rationalist - and delicate - beauty which she had already realised with her Glass House (1951), but on a much greater scale, veering towards a new sense of solidity and popular engagement. Like the Glass House, it also highlighted a fascination with collecting, which Bo Bardi had entertained since childhood, and the contents, as much as the form of a building. This was to become a powerful component of her subsequent work, in which form became increasingly solid, yet playful - embracing a deliberate aesthetic impurity - and ‘little things', evoking both the simple and sacred dimensions of everyday life and its accompanying rituals, became central to the decoration or elaboration of the whole architectural idea.
It was in northeast Brazil, where Bo Bardi practised architecture alongside teaching and running a popular cultural centre in Bahia (closed down by the government in 1964), and against a backdrop of successive political and economic crises, that she really developed her work in this form. The SESC leisure centre, converted out of an old factory, in Bahia was, she said, ‘"to be even uglier than the MASP!"' (de Oliveira 2006, p 203) She deliberately strove to retain the factory image of the complex in its working-class area, and a sense of raw materiality, and she dedicated the place to the idea of enjoyment, vitality and fluidity, in both architectural and social terms. As she said, ‘"I had lived in Bahia and seen the real Brazil, not the one of European"' (de Oliveira 2006, p 323), finding huge inspiration in the deep-rooted African traditions which sustained and energised popular social life.
SESC leisure centre. Archives Instituto Lina Bo e P. M. Bardi, São Paulo, Brazil
De Oliveira (2006), in one of the two English-language publications on Bo Bardi, discusses her commitment to a non-hierarchical, non-linear approach to space and time in her work, such that routes, transitional spaces, juxtapositions of scale, materials and found objects, and a fusion of plant life with built form, all become very important - drawing people around a building as if in a sensual dance, engaging the whole body and all its senses. In this sense, her sensibility may well be described as playful and indeed childlike, and the fact that Bo Bardi herself had no children in no way prevented her from engaging with a child's perspective on the built environment. She delighted in building into her projects unexpected discoveries and surprises at a domestic level of detail, simultaneously infused with a transcendent symbolic dimension. In her earlier Chame-Chame house in Salvador, she embedded the walls with objects she collected from the environs, including pieces of broken dolls. At SESC, she took charge of the signage, furniture, uniforms and programme of activities after the building had opened, and she dedicated her work there ‘to the youngsters, to the children and to the third age: all together.' (Carvalho Ferraz 1994, p 231)
De Oliveira describes Bo Bardi's work in terms of a bricolage, which goes beyond architecture, and a continuous reinvention of identities which deliberately rejects ideals of abstraction, aesthetic purity, technological positivism and progress in general. She wholeheartedly embraced the idea of time as a ‘tangle' which cannot be unravelled and rationalised, even as she admired the rationalist tradition for what it brought to the debate. ‘Functionalism' was for her much more a question of domesticity and utility at an everyday, non-ideological level. And she happily diversified her activities across a rich range of cultural outputs, including journalism, teaching, curating and activism, engaging with many different cultural and political figures of the time. If, for that reason, she did not ultimately build a great number of architectural structures, and perhaps was not concerned to establish an ‘oeuvre' in that sense, it augments, rather than diminishes, the significance of her contribution to the architectural and cultural debate of the 20th century.
Clare Melhuish
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