by Lina Editorial Team*
Prólogo
At a time when the professional practice of architecture is beginning to change its - traditionally - imposed male orientation, we propose the column 'Na Janela' (In the Window) as a break of resistance that interrupts the "official" writing and reading of history, opening space for change. Through historical recuperations we will explore and analyze the paths, professional and political, of women architects who contributed to the transformation of architectural production and its consumption, claiming and exercising, simultaneously, the right to memory and recognition of the contribution of these women. With these windows we also want to signal the transdisciplinary, political and collective dimension of architectural legacies, and create openings for the formulation of critical dialogues between them and contemporary feminist architecture and urban practices.
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"what I wanted was to have history"
Archilina Bo, Lina Bo Bardi, Dona Lina - the Italian-Brazilian architect (1914-1992), unavoidable name of modernism in western architecture, godmother of this project, to whom we dedicate this first Janela (Window).
Lina's work is revolutionary. Her professional path, which articulates a dense theoretical and practical production, has contributed and continues to contribute to new ways of thinking and making architecture. Her complex trajectory, which recovers lost discussions in the architectural discourse inherited from her experiences between Italy and Brazil, and explores the Global North/South and North/South dynamics in Brazil — not only allows us to broaden our understanding of the modern movement in 20th century architecture — but also, to understand the impact of gendered power dynamics in the social context, in general, and in the context of the professional practice of architecture, in particular.
Without mystifying the figure of Lina Bo Bardi, we want to highlight the importance and relevance of her legacy, whose critical actuality still resonates today, almost 30 years after her death.
"The artist's freedom is always 'individual', but true freedom can only be collective.”[1] Lina Bo Bardi
Ghosts of Modernism
Achillina Bo (1914, Rome - 1992, São Paulo) was an Italian-Brazilian architect whose legacy marked the history of architecture in Italy and Brazil. Her work can be found exclusively in Brazil, the country to which she migrated after World War II, in 1946, and where she became a naturalized citizen in 1951. A multidisciplinary architect, she lived intensely and passionately between artistic work and political and socio-cultural reflection. Her work, although significant, politically revolutionary and formally innovative, remains unknown to most of the general public, and even in specialized spheres —
dedicated to the teaching, practice and dissemination of architecture and urbanism — the diffusion and recognition of Lina's work is still an exception.
Besides her contribution as an architect, Lina was actively engaged in other fields — She runned editorial projects, and also worked as a scenographer, writer and educator [2], leaving us references through which it is possible to access her broad and rich trajectory — between Italy and Brazil, and in different contexts in Brazil (Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo and Salvador). Thus, her thought and production, although very much anchored to the architectural practice of the mentioned territories, can be critically related to the proposals developed in the international history of modern Western architecture.
In 1993, a year after her death, the architect and Lina’s peer, Marcelo Carvalho Ferraz, edited in collaboration with Lina Bo and P.M. Bardi Institute the publication of the book Lina Bo Bardi and the making of the documentary of the same name. For Ferraz(2018), "Lina's work is a mandatory reference for those who see in architecture the possibility of fighting for a more just and comfortable world"[3]. The collective peer recognition of this statement, albeit belated (post-mortem), came in the awarding of the Special Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale Architettura 2021 in March 2021. This 17th Venice Architecture Biennale had the theme "How will we live together?" and Lebanese curator Hashim Sarkis made a plea:
"We need a new space contract. In the context of worsening political divides and growing economic inequalities, we call on architects to imagine spaces in which we can live generously together,"[4] a new spatial contract that Lina had understood long ago, and applied to her works. According to Hashim Sarkis — for whom Lina best represents the theme of the 2021 Biennale — she "exemplifies perseverance in difficult times, be they of war, political conflict, or immigration, and her ability to remain creative, generous, and optimistic at all times"[5]. As architect Marina Grinover (2011) also puts it in her article "A forma a partir do espaço em uso, construções de Lina Bo Bardi":
"For the architect it matters how that new place will come to life. In her drawings we can see the planning of life that takes place more than the architecture that houses it. Lina drew life, existence in a place. Poetically she leads us to freedom because she lets us determine how life can be, in the MASP (1957-1968) or in the SESC Pompéia's living room (1977-1986), for example". (translated by the Editorial Team)
First of all, it is essential to understand the historical context in which Lina Bo Bardi lived and acted. On this issue Francesco Perrotta-Bosch (2021), the author of Lina: A Biography, points out that "being a woman architect in the 20th century is a point outside the curve"[6] . The presence of women in modernism was, at the time, the exception to the rule of male predominance in architecture schools. Such a fact contextualizes the current notion of Star System [7] as anachronistic to the professional status of women architects in the twentieth century.
Still on the issue of the professional contribution of women architects in the modernist context, the architect and historian Beatriz Colomina (2018), enunciates, "Women are still the ghosts of modern architecture." In this sense, it is understood that women architects were constantly exposed to a series of exclusionary dynamics - such as the attribution of authorship of their creations to partners or colleagues (Le Corbusier – Perriand or Mies Van der Rohe – Lilly Reich). These dynamics, whose immediate impact was the boycott of career development and lack of professional recognition, had dramatic consequences for the way architectural history was written and taught — an example being the residual references to the work of women architects in the canonical discourses of modernist architecture.
However, as historian Esther da Costa Meyer demonstrates in her essay After the Flood (2002), Lina Bo Bardi did not have the same recognition as her contemporaries. Lina's path was marked by a double context of marginalization; firstly due to social markers of gender — although Lina did not identify herself as a "woman architect", we know that the fact that she was a woman arguably influenced the erasure and diffusion of her work in Europe and Brazil. On the other hand, the imperial, colonial, and capitalist power relations instituted by the Global North through domination and the exercise of violence over the Global South, result (among many other things) in the erasure, expropriation, and material and/or symbolic exclusion of the cultural expressions of these geographies – hence the non-recognition, non-legitimation, of the architectural production of non-hegemonic geographies (countries of the Global South).
In the process of historical recuperation of the life and work of Lina Bo Bardi, especially when guided by a feminist and contemporary perspective, it is important not to fall into discourses that romanticize or mystify her figure, recognizing for this the ambivalences and contradictions that defined her path. In this sense, it is also important to consider those that would be Lina's own words, who did not called herself a feminist, thus avoiding distortions or reductions.
While studying architecture in Rome, Lina Bo was one of three women in her class of thirty-three students. In 1939 she concluded her studies by presenting the final project of the Interdisciplinary Graduation Work (TGI), "Assistance Center for Maternity and Childhood", a maternity hospital for single mothers. The project impressed the conservative and classical academia of the time, for its innovative design and controversial programmatic choice. In fact, it was a controversial issue due to the humanist thinking required for hospital architecture, and in this case a public hospital equipment for women. According to Marina Grinover, responsible for the MASP School Course, in her "Lina Bo Bardi from ideas to construction: architecture as cultural action" [8] it is told that the director of the school pointed out, after the end of the course, that from then on Lina could "find a husband and take care of her children". Despite the hostile academic and historical environment (WWII) Lina had the opportunity to work in Milan with Gio Ponti, between 1940 and 1943, and later with Carlo Pagani, with whom she started her editorial activity in art and architecture magazines. Besides facing the hostility of the profession's sexism, she also suffered from the direct consequences of the war — such as the bombing of her office.
From 1940, Lina Bo Bardi begins her work as editor in several Italian architectural magazines such as Domus, Casabella, Lo Stile - nella casa e nell'arredamento and the weekly magazine 'A' - Attualità, Architettura, Abitazione, Arte, having also collaborated in Grazia, Bellezza, Vetrina and L'Illustrazione Italiana. Lina's editorial work fits into the continuity of those "pioneering efforts of many early twentieth-century European reformers who tried to improve the status of women as women"(McLeod, 2005). Mary McLeod (2005), in her article A Dream Postponed. A Feminist History of Architecture argues for the necessity of addressing the paradoxes and ambiguities of the modern movement by pointing out that we must "arrive at a broader and more complex view of modernism — one that embraces its regressive and progressive dimensions." Modernism had a major formal impact on architecture, but it also represented new dynamics of everyday life, especially for women, both in Europe and Brazil in the 1950s. The impact that the domestic reforms [9] of the modern plan had on housing typologies boosted women as housewives and, paradoxically, optimized these women's time in the domestic space.
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Lina's editorial work and writings are fundamental to understand her career, an experience she transported to Brazil in 1946 and which was subsequently less considered than her constructed work. In 1950 she founded the magazine Habitat - magazine of the arts in Brazil where she kept a column of chronicles under the pseudonym Alencastro. Then in 1958 he begins to write the "Chronicles of art, history, custom, culture of life: architecture, painting, sculpture, music and visual arts" in Diário de Notícias de Salvador, after taking over the direction of the MAM-BA after having reformed it in the Solar do Unhão.
The initiative of Habitat magazine arises with the invitation of Assis de Chateaubriand to P.M. Bardi for the elaboration of the project of the Art Museum of São Paulo, the reason why the Bardi Couple moved to São Paulo, instead of staying in Rio de Janeiro. In 1968, 18 years later, this invitation resulted in the inauguration of the MASP on Paulista Avenue, a "beautiful woman's dream"[10]. Lina's written production in Salvador arises from an invitation by the School of Fine Arts, first to give lectures and then to work in the Architecture and Urbanism Course, together with the architect Diógenes Rebouças. According to the author Zeuler R. Lima (2021), "her experience in Salvador rekindled the energy of her youth in Italy, especially at the end of the World War II [...]” (translated by the authors) and it was this "domestic exile" between 1958-1963 that spurred her interest in the popular culture of the Nordeste. In it we can revisit her experience during the reconstruction period, when she travelled in Italy to document the destruction caused by the bombardments. The knowledge she acquired, between Italy and the Northeast of Brazil, provided theoretical reading on the difference between popular culture and folklore, important concepts for the understanding of her constructed work. Folklore was thus associated as the negative side of history, antiquated and essential to the propaganda of fascism, while the popular art of the Northeastern backlands had a symbolic charge, primordial in the creation of a Brazilian culture in constant transformation.
Lina Bo Bardi's written production was collected in the book Lina Por Escrito (2009), organised by the architects Marina Grinover and Silvana Rubino, an important work in the current panorama for understanding the architect's thought - and unfortunately difficult to find. It brings together 33 texts by Lina that punctuate her career, where architecture, art, education, museology and her projects and those of other authors are discussed. The text Bela Criança (1951) on the building of the Ministry of Education and Health, by Lúcio Costa, illustrates Lina's thinking on Brazilian modernism:
This lack of politeness, this rudeness, this unconcerned taking and transforming, is the strength of contemporary Brazilian architecture; it is a continuous possessing in itself, between technical consciousness, spontaneity and the ardour of primitive art [...].(translated by the Editorial Team)
The architect and art historian Ana Luiza Nobre reminds us how "Bahia [played] a transformative role in Lina's work"[11]. Thus, her encounter with the popular arts of the Northeast radically transformed her relationship with architecture, where she questioned the elitist principles of the architectural profession. In 1958, in the first class of the Architecture course of the Faculty of Fine Arts of the Federal University of Bahia — whose edited manuscript is entitled Teoria e filosofia da arquitectura — Lina speaks that we have to "[...] Throw away from us the complex of the individualistic architect, creator almost exclusively of beautiful forms." The transformation of Lina's thinking that comes from this experience in the Northeast materializes when she returns to São Paulo, and writes the text Planejamento ambiental: “desenho” no impasse (1976), where she points out: "The freedom of the artist is always "individual", but true freedom can only be collective," or even in the text Arquitetura e tecnologia (1979) where she writes "I am against seeing architecture only as a status project. [...] I think the people must make architecture." (all quotations were translated by the Editorial Team)
At the end of her career in 1989, for the inauguration of the exhibition about her work in the salão camelo of the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism of the University of São Paulo, Lina gave a Lesson on Architecture, where she explained that
“[...] it is necessary to free oneself from "ties", not simply throw away the past and all its history; what is needed is to consider the past as a historical present, still alive. In the light of it, our task is to forge another, true present." (Translated by the Editorial Team).
Which may sum up her position as a modern Italian-Brazilian architect in the post-modern reality of the 1990s.
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With all due respect, Dona Lina!
Recently, the board of the MAM-BA museum tried to cut the physical relationship between the community of the Solar do Unhão and the museum, making it difficult to exchange knowledge and know-how between the MAM and the community, as recommended by UNESCO. This goes completely against what Lina had envisioned when she designed the Museum of Popular/Modern Art in Salvador. Even today you can hear the community of the Solar do Unhão shouting "MAM Racist! For the elite, pier and big house; for the community, barbed wire" [12]. In the article With all due respect, Dona Lina! [13] by graffiti artist, founder of MUSAS (Museu de Street Art Salvador) and community leader Júlio Costa, published on 16 August 2021, we read: "Dona Lina imagined that MAM should be for the people and of the people of Solar do Unhão" and "for the avant-garde Lina Bo Bardi, the integration of the people of the community with the MAM projects was always a dream" (translated by the authors). This dream of Lina's — with all its meaning — should be preserved, with the utmost attention, so that it is not a dream postponed, nor misrepresented by the elite.
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Notas
*A Equipa Editorial deste número é composta por:
Alícia Medeiros, Arquiteta, Investigadora, Artista e Produtora Cultural Independente. Co-fundadora do Coletivo MAAD.
Ana Arantes, Estudante de Arquitetura.Co-fundadora do Núcleo Feminista da FAUP.
Chloé Darmon, Arquiteta e Investigadora. Co-fundadora do Núcleo Feminista da FAUP.
Isabeli Santiago, Historiadora de Arte, Investigadora e Assistente de Curadoria na Galeria Municipal do Porto. Co-fundadora do Coletivo MAAD.
Natália Fávero, Arquiteta e Investigadora. Co-fundadora do Núcleo Feminista da FAUP.
[1] Lina Bo Bardi, Planejamento ambiental : “desenho” no impasse, 1976 : p.4.
[2] Most of Lina Bo's project files are available at: https://portal.institutobardi.org/
[3] Available at: https://vitruvius.com.br/pesquisa/bookshelf/book/1898
[4] Available at: https://www.labiennale.org/en/architecture/2021
[5] Available at: https://www.caumg.gov.br/bienal-de-veneza-homenagem-a-lina-bo-bardi/
[6] Podcast Desígnios, Estranhas do Ninho. “Lina Bo Bardi : histórias de vida e carreira da arquiteta”, as guests: Francesco Perrotta-Bosch e Marcelo Carvalho Ferraz (16.09.2021).
[7] We use here the concept of Denise Scott Brown from the paper “Room at the Top? Sexism and the Star System in Architecture” available at:
[8] Available at : https://masp.org.br/masp-escola/lina-bo-bardi?fbclid=IwAR0WXK2102h3ofZ0h_rbkJV1RVcNZm6kSzb0IAi_PGUzUwK2eaDqmLeRvIA - August-September 2020.
[9] This movement can be described by the term "relational feminism", theorised by historian Karen Offen, quoted by Mary McLeod (2005) in "A Dream Postponed. A Feminist History of Architecture".
[10] P.M. Bardi's words the first time Lina mentioned her wish to build the MASP on the Trianon site, before Lina was invited to direct the Modern Arts Museum of Bahia (MAM-BA).
[11] Podcast Arquicast059 - Lina Bo Bardi as guests: Ana Luiza Nobre and Renato Anelli. Nov. 2018.
[12] Available at: https://www.instagram.com/p/CSqLClyAbMZ/
Referências
Costa Meyer, E. da. (2002). After the Flood. In Harvard Design Magazine, No. 16.
Ferraz, M. (org.) (1993). “Lina Bo Bardi”. São Paulo: Instituto Lina Bo e P. M. Bardi.
Grinover, M. (Junho de 2011). A forma a partir do espaço em uso, construções de Lina Bo Bardi. In 9º seminário docomomo Brasil.
Lima, Z. R. (15 de Jun. 2021). Salvador, o “exílio doméstico” onde Lina Bo Bardi se apaixonou pela cultura popular. In El País; Cultura; Tribuna.
McLeod, M. (Abr. 2005). A dream deferred. Feminist Architecture History. In Casabella. Nº 732. Nobre, A. L. (Nov. 2018) In Podcast Arquicast059, Lina Bo Bardi.
Rubino, S.; Grinover, M. (Orgs.) (2009). Lina por escrito. Textos escolhidos de Lina Bo Bardi. Coleção Face Norte, volume 13. São Paulo, Cosac Naify.