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Casa de Vidro, Lina Bo Bardi (1950-51). \u00a9 Instituto Lina Bo e P.M. Bardi<\/p>\nIn 2003 I spent two weeks in S\u00e3o Paulo with my son, who was a little over two at the time. We visited three works by Lina Bo Bardi: the S\u00e3o Paulo Museum of Art (MASP), the Glass House, and the SESC Pompeia cultural centre. It was a gift to be able to visit them with him.<\/p>\n
I remember carrying him in my arms around the Glass House (1950-51), feeling the emotion of climbing the stairs in a house perched among the treetops, and finding an open space full of objects with the forest in the background. Our eyes skipped from one piece to the next in a space that was ideal for discovery. At the same time, my thoughts continuously wandered back to the Case Study Houses in Los Angeles, especially the first version of Case Study #8, by Ray and Charles Eames (1945). Both houses express the sense that, after World War II, a new world was possible. A transparent, democratic, flexible, fluid world where architecture would be prefabricated, inexpensive, efficient and beautiful.<\/p>\n
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Casa de Vidro, Lina Bo Bardi (1950-51). \u00a9 Instituto Lina Bo e P.M. Bardi<\/p>\n
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Case Study House #8, Ray and Charles Eames (1945). Drawing published in Arts & Architecture <\/em>magazine, December 1945<\/p>\n Walking through the garden we came across a wood cabin hidden away among the plants. It was painted green and had been Lina\u2019s studio; at that moment, it was the main office of the Instituto Lina Bo Bardi. It had the air of a cabin for thinking, for focusing on work, on design, as an intimate act; a place for playing as you draw, for thinking with your hands.<\/p>\n The visit to the MASP left us wide-eyed and open-mouthed. I think we both experienced the same feeling of both weight and weightlessness, the potential of that vast space opening up to the city under the shelter of its massive structure.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n The sketches Perspectiva do Belvedere<\/em> and Perspectiva<\/em> do Belvedere indicando instala\u00e7\u00e3o do circo Piolim<\/em> transport me back to that moment: one of them shows us the void, and the other, the possibility of hosting any kind of event, all the potential of a public space. Zooming into the drawing, it looks as though Lina were asking us, \u201cRock, paper, circus?\u201d, but we don\u2019t really have to choose. Everything is offered to us with the same value: nature and the arts. It isn\u2019t arbitrary, I view it as a manifesto. Lina draws a public, democratic space, open to celebration and participation.<\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n \u201cWhen the American musician and poet John Cage travelled to S\u00e3o Paulo, when his car was going down the Avenida Paulista, he asked the driver to stop next to the MASP. Cage stepped out and walked from one side of the belvedere to the other, raised his arms, and exclaimed: \u2018It\u2019s the architecture of freedom!\u2019 I was used to praise for having made the largest free span concrete structure in the world with a permanent load and a flat roof, but the great artist\u2019s statement conveyed what I considered essential in the MASP project: the museum was NOTHING, it was the elimination of obstacles, the ability to be free in relation to things\u201d<\/em>.[1]<\/a><\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n Inside the MASP, Lina Bo Bardi\u2019s proposal for displaying the art collection was not applied, but it was etched in my memory: the exhibition hall inhabited by the pieces with which Lina seems to invite us to play heads or tails. All the works welcome us with their heads, like a crowd waiting to engage in a dialogue with us, without mediation. Heads are the pure experience of the piece, and tails are where Lina leaves a space for interpretation: title, artist, date, technique. It is a game in which she invites us to actively engage. Freeing a work of art from the wall is an exercise that Lina Bo Bardi had witnessed in other designers such as Franco Albini. For Lina Bo Bardi, the point is not to achieve an interesting design effect. The aim is more radical \u2013that of understanding the reception of art as the experience of stepping forth to encounter the other, the unknown, opening up to curiosity and amazement.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n We visited the SESC Pompeia cultural centre (1977-86) three days in a row. I cannot imagine a better way of experiencing the SESC than with my son. We explored that city of sorts full of tucked-away corners and buzzing with activity. We started off in the library, where we leafed through storybooks in the company of chess players; we watched sports activities and took a dip in the pool; we saw people going to the health care centre and sat to watch a little comedy performance for raising awareness about sexually transmitted disease prevention. Strolling through an interior landscape full of plants, we crossed a brook that led us to an Antoni Abad exhibition; visiting the arts and crafts studios we got our faces and hands dirty; we shared a table in the cafeteria and then took a nap. We saw children and everyone else at play, and we felt we were part of them; as we played, we had a sense of belonging to the place. By doing almost nothing, <\/em>Lina Bo Bardi achieves everything<\/em>: a factory that had housed a production and operation centre becomes a place that opens up to living, exchanging, caring, creating, learning \u2013in other words, to culture.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/em>\u201cNobody changed a thing. We found an architecturally powerful, original factory with a beautiful structure: nobody touched it. […] All we did was add a few things: a bit of water, a chimney. The original idea for repurposing the complex was informed by <\/em>architettura povera, not in the sense of its being impoverished, but in the artisanal sense of achieving the highest degree of Communication and Dignity with minimal, humble means.\u201d (Lina Bo Bardi por escrito, p. 192)<\/em><\/p>\n Lina Bo Bardi invites us to play. To play in the most political and social meaning of the word, by creating public spaces for celebrating coexistence and mutual care in the broadest sense. To play at merging with our surroundings, without hierarchies, in a place where presentation and representation, tradition and modernity, the living and the inert, the human and the nonhuman coexist in freedom.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0 <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n [1]<\/a> Lina Bo Bardi, Una clase de arquitectura<\/em>, S\u00e3o Paulo School of Architecture and Urban Planning, 1989. Source: \u201cLa gran vaca mec\u00e1nica\u201d, by Mara S\u00e1nchez Llorens, published in the magazine Circo 2010-161<\/a>, Madrid.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.fmirobcn.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/03\/03-1.jpg\")
Perspectiva do Belvedere<\/em>. MASP, Lina Bo Bardi (1957-68). \u00a9 Instituto Lina Bo e P.M. Bardi<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.fmirobcn.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/03\/04-1.jpg\")
Perspectiva do Belvedere indicando instala\u00e7\u00e3o do circo Piolim<\/em>. MASP, Lina Bo Bardi (1957-68). \u00a9 Instituto Lina Bo e P.M. Bardi<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.fmirobcn.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/03\/05-1.jpg\")
\nMASP painting collection. \u00a9 Paulo Gasparini\/Instituto Lina Bo e P.M. Bardi<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.fmirobcn.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/03\/06-1.png\")
\nFranco Albini, Pinacoteca di Brera, Mostra di Scipione e del Bianco e Nero<\/em>, Milan (1941). Photo: Fondazione Franco Albini collection<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.fmirobcn.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/03\/07-ok-e1553863205980.jpg\")
\nActivity hall at SESC Pompeia, Lina Bo Bardi (1977)\u00a0 \u00a9 Instituto Lina Bo e P.M. Bardi<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.fmirobcn.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/03\/08-e1553863228478.jpg\")
\nRio S\u00e3o Francisco do SESC Pompeia<\/em>, S\u00e3o Paulo, 1977. Fotografia: Ant\u00f4nio Saggese<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.fmirobcn.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/03\/9i10juntes.jpg\")
Logo for SESC Pompeia, Lina Bo Bardi (1977-86) \u00a9 Instituto Lina Bo e P.M. Bardi
\nSunny Sunday at SESC Pompeia<\/em>. Photo: Marcelo Ferraz<\/p>\n