In November 1968 Queen Elizabeth II inaugurated the Museu de Arte de São Paulo, the MASP, in São Paulo. The building is a box of glass and concrete 74 metres wide and 30 long, hung from two great red portals, which seems not to touch the ground. Beneath the box there is no atrium, no fenced garden: there is an empty square, open to anyone passing along Avenida Paulista. Its designer was not Brazilian by birth. She was Lina Bo Bardi (1914–1992), born in Rome as Achillina Bo, who arrived in Brazil at thirty-two with a husband who was an art critic, a degree in architecture and almost nothing built.
Her training is Italian, and far from ordinary. She graduated in Rome in 1939, worked in Milan with Gio Ponti on the magazines Domus and Lo Stile. When the bombing of 1943 destroyed her Milanese studio, architecture remained for years mostly paper and ink. In 1946 she married Pietro Maria Bardi, an art dealer and critic, and the two moved to Brazil. In São Paulo he directed the MASP, founded in 1947 by Assis Chateaubriand; she would design its definitive home ten years later.
The MASP: a building that does not occupy the ground
The constraint is well known, and it decides everything. The plot on Avenida Paulista, the Belvedere Trianon, had been donated to the city on condition that the view over the Anhangabaú valley remain free of buildings. Lina does not get around the constraint: she takes it as her theme. She lifts the museum on four supports (two prestressed-concrete portals painted red) with a clear span of 74 metres and leaves the ground level completely empty. The exhibition volume sits eight metres up; beneath it, a covered belvedere that becomes a market, a stage for demonstrations, a meeting place. In the years of the military dictatorship that ruled Brazil from 1964 to 1985, and then in those of democracy, that square is a place of assembly.
The most radical gesture, however, is inside. In 1968 Lina placed the paintings on crystal easels: sheets of tempered glass set into concrete bases, with no walls, no frames separating them from the space. The visitor sees a Raphael or a Van Gogh as if floating in the room, and on the back of the canvas reads the label, the restoration notes, the gallery stamp: the work displayed as an object with a material history, not as a relic. A museum conceived this way abolished the sacred hierarchy between hall and visitor. It was dismantled in 1996 and reinstalled, on philological criteria, in 2015.
SESC Pompéia: the factory that becomes a city
In 1977 Lina received from SESC, the system of cultural and recreational services for workers funded by the Brazilian commercial sector, the commission to turn a former factory in the working-class district of Pompéia into a leisure centre. The classic temptation would have been to demolish and build anew. Lina did the opposite: she kept the long brick and concrete halls of the 1930s, cleaned them, and used them as library, theatre, canteen, workshops. What in the European imagination would have been a factory-monument to be museified remains here a place that is used every day.
The new addition is two towers of raw concrete linked by suspended walkways: one for the gyms and the swimming pool, the other for changing rooms and services. The façades are pierced by irregular openings, without frames, like caves dug in rock. The walkways cross the void between the two towers at several levels, and the visitor who walks them passes from one to the other as on a bridge between two cliffs. Below, among the old sheds, Lina designed a pool in the shape of a stream and a long timber deck that serves as an urban beach: on Sundays there are families with baskets and children barefoot. It is a program that can be summed up in a single word: conviviality.
Another idea of the modern
Brazilian brutalism has a school in which Lina does not quite belong: the Paulista one of Vilanova Artigas and Paulo Mendes da Rocha, which makes exposed concrete an ethical position. Lina uses it, but mixes it with what that school tended to exclude: craft, the popular culture of the Northeast, joy. In Salvador, where she directed the Museu de Arte Moderna da Bahia between 1959 and 1964, she restored the Solar do Unhão, an old complex of sugar mills overlooking the bay, and added to it a helical timber staircase built by joinery, without nails, using shipbuilding carpentry techniques. She is not looking for purity of language: she is looking for use.
This preference for use over image explains why her work was rediscovered so late. For decades modernist history textbooks treated her as an eccentric; today she is a required reference for anyone concerned with adaptive reuse, public space, social architecture. In 2021 the Venice Biennale awarded her, posthumously, the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement. The MASP, restored and rethought in 2015 with the original display choices, continues to host demonstrations and concerts beneath its red beams, exactly as she had foreseen in 1957.