A generation ago Lina Bo Bardi was not much known outside Brazil, and not much talked about. Today, notably in academia and architecture schools, she is arguably the most referenced and most widely influential architect of her era. Sure, Mies van der Rohe’s buildings were more minimal – but were they so cool as to be cold? And certainly Le Corbusier’s concrete constructions continue to mesmerise architects worldwide, but was he too wilful, too arrogant, too involved with his own genius?
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Bo Bardi’s impulses pulled her in different directions. She was a brilliant manipulator of form and space and clearly had a fetish for massive concrete structures, yet she was equally interested in the delicacy of a rococo table, the pattern of a traditional basket and the art of indigenous peoples. All of this is right there in her drawings, which at the Fundació Joan Miró were displayed rather neatly in a homage to her MASP concept, as objects in space rather than two-dimensional artefacts on the walls. That they were mounted on scaffolding poles rather than glass, using the language of the construction site rather than the vitrine, appeared perfectly in tune with the architect’s idea that buildings are only complete – and only come alive – when they are populated by things and by people.1
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- 1. In the global north it is nature outside that changes through the seasons, giving a constantly shifting canvas; but in the tropics the forest stays green and lush – the interior has to change.
