Lina Bò Bardi

Architect, Brazil
Lina Bò Bardi was born in Rome, Italy, in 1914 and died in São Paolo, Brazil, in
1992. She was among the most prolific women architects of the 20th century. She was
also a noted designer of furniture, jewelry, staging and installations, as well as an
architectural writer and editor. Bò Bardi emerged at an early age as strong willed and
unconventional and was one of a handful of women to study in the College of
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Architecture at Rome University in the late 1930s. Her graduation project revealed her
nonconformist bent. The project was in a modern style and was at odds with the
historicism of her teachers Marcello Piacentini and Gustavo Giovannoni; it was a largescale
maternity hospital for unwed mothers, and was an unusual choice of topic in the
family-oriented society of prewar Italy.
On graduation, Bò Bardi left for Milan and worked for the modernist architect and
designer Gio Ponti. Ponti was the director of the Triennale of Milan and of the
architecture and design magazine Domus , both major platforms for Italian modern architecture
and industrial design. At the same time, Bò Bardi, at the age of 24, opened her own onewoman
architectural office, supporting herself as an illustrator for Stile, a woman’s fashion
magazine. In 1943 when Italy went to war, at the age of 25, she accepted the position of
codirector of Do mus and was also a member of the Italian resistance. After the war, in 1946, she
founded the famous A, Cultu ra della Vita with Bruno Zevi, and married the art critic Pietro Bardi. Because
she had been a wartime supporter of Benito Mussolini, Bò Bardi would have had a
difficult professional life in Italy. Hence, the couple left for Brazil in 1947, and jointly
founded the celebrated art magazine Habitat. Bò Bardi, then 29, again opened an architectural
firm, and remained in active practice until the end of her life.
Bò Bardi’s architecture is characterized by its often-daring, concrete
construction engineered in pursuit of Miesian-inspired universal spaces.
The Glass House (1951), which she designed for herself and Bardi just
outside São Paolo, juts out from the top of a steeply inclined site and is
screened by the surrounding tropical forest. It is an early example of the
use of reinforced concrete and glass for a domestic building. Despite its
formidable weight, it achieves an effect of airy lightness using just seven
slender columns that support the structure. Her scheme for the Taba
Guaianases Building, commissioned for the media conglomerate Diarios
Associados in São Paolo (1951, never completed), represented yet another
technical feat. The main issue in the scheme was technical: how to place a
building of 1,500 apartments on top of a large theater with 1,500 seats,
remaining free of columns. She collaborated on the structural engineering
with the famed Italian engineer Pier Luigi Nervi. One of her most famous
buildings, the Museum of São Paulo (1957–68), is a 70-meter-long glazed
structure, suspended from two prestressed longitudinal concrete beams on
the roof, resting on four pillars with a clear span under it. The exhibition
hall thus created is an immense universal space, unencumbered by
structural elements; the immense resulting space under the building
(named the Belvedere because of the view it affords over São Paolo)
became one of the most popular public places in the city. With its use of
concrete construction and search for universal space, it recalls her
uncompleted Museum on the Seashore (1951) in São Paolo. Bò Bardi’s
second most famous project, the Pompéia Factory (1977) in São Paolo,
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converted an abandoned steeldrum factory into a cultural and recreational
center. She qualified this low-cost project as Arquitetura Povera, inspired
by the art movement in Italy during the 1960s, called Arte Povera
(literally, poor art). Located in a 19th-century industrial complex, it exploits rather than rejects the gritty realism of the site. The two concrete high-rise
structures that she added to the complex are reminiscent of silos, bunkers, or containers,
with a series of seven prestressed-concrete walkways linking them. It contains a
swimming pool, gymnasium, studios for arts and crafts, a dance hall, and a theater for
1,200 spectators, a library, a restaurant, and exhibition halls.
Bò Bardi also built or designed many small domestic buildings in a critical regionalist
spirit, incorporating tropical vegetation into the concrete construction in novel ways: her
Chame-Chame House (1958) in Bahia preserves a Jaca tree at the center of the design
and, as in her home for Valeria P.Cirell (1958) in São Paolo, combines stones, ceramic
chips, and plants in the wall slabs creating vertical garden walls. She was also involved in
many renovation projects: Solar do Unhao (1963) in Bahia, the Historical Center of Bahia
(1986), the House of Benin (1987) in Bahia, and Misericórdia Slope (1987) in Bahia.
Moreover, she designed furniture; the most famous example is a classic of postwar
furniture design, a chair called “Bardi’s Bowl” (1951). Much like her early buildings, it is
an exercise in structural thinking. In the form of a mobile hemispherical bowl, it rests on
a light steel structure made up of a circular ring supported on four thin legs.
Bò Bardi’s last project was for the conversion of the old Palace of Industries of São
Paolo into the new City Hall (1992).