A retrospective installation in the name of Lina Bo Bardi

Lina Bo Bardi, a Brazilian architect born in Italy, lived from 1914–92. Much of this retrospective installation at the Venice Biennale focuses on Bo Bardi’s two best-known buildings – the Museu de Arte de São Paulo MASP and the SESC Fábrica de Pompéia. They, along with several other projects, are represented with drawings and photographs, and there is also a large model of the Fábrica de Pompéia.

The Museu de Arte de São Paulo, 1957–68, is structured as an enormous, 70-metre portico that holds the central galleries and frees up the ground space underneath. It was a public space unlike any other in Brazil at the time, and has been used for large gatherings of all kinds. For the gallery space, which has no walls, Bo Bardi also designed ingenious display systems with concrete blocks weighing down glass panels.

The SESC Fábrica de Pompéia was a disused factory that Bo Bardi converted into a multi-purpose cultural centre, with theatres, gyms, a swimming pool, restaurants, workshops and many other kinds of leisure areas. Clearly and decisively modern, even Brutalist, in its exterior form, the Fábrica nonetheless manages to be playful and humane. In its creative repurposing of a vacant structure, it could easily be seen as a preemptive, entirely positive response to the questions posed both by the Dutch pavilion and OMA’s Preservation installation.

Bo Bardi’s buildings are consistently fascinating, and her drawings are incredibly lovely: lively and colourful, they seem more interested in the life made possible by the buildings than the buildings themselves, and yet they are also fundamentally architectural, clearly showing how the buildings work and how they fit together. Bo Bardi’s work deserves to be much better known, and this installation is a good start.

More of Lina Bo Bardi’s work is featured in Phaidon’s Brazil’s Modern Architecture.

By Sara Goldsmith
Project Editor, Architecture & Design, Phaidon