LINA BO BARDI is undoubtedly one of the most significant and revolutionary figures of twentieth-century architecture.

After graduating in architecture in Rome in 1939, she moved to Milan where she began her professional collaboration with Carlo Pagani and with Giò Ponti’s studio. At the same time she began an intense publishing activity. Among the periodicals with which she collaborates are: «Tempo», «Stile», «Grazia», «L’Illustration Italiana». In 1944, with Carlo Pagani, he was deputy director of the magazine «Domus». The following year, the two founded and directed «Quaderni di Domus» and, with the support of Bruno Zevi, created the magazine «A-Cultura delle vita» to disseminate a “rational” way of living among a wider public.

She participates in the resistance and is one of the founders in 1945 of the Movimento Studi Architettura (MSA). In 1946, together with her husband Pietro Maria Bardi, invited to direct the São Paulo Museum of Art, she moved to Brazil, a place that she chose as her homeland – she would in fact become a Brazilian citizen. Bo Bardi is convinced that the architect’s function must first of all be to know the way people live in their own homes and, therefore, to solve the difficulties that complicate the lives of thousands of people through technology.

“For an architect, the most important thing – she writes in fact – is not to build well, but to know how most people live. The architect is a master of life, in the modest sense of mastering how to cook beans, how to cook the stove, being forced to see how the toilet works, how to take a bath. He has a poetic dream, which is beautiful, of an architecture that gives a sense of freedom.”

In 1950 she founded and directed the magazine «Habitat» with her husband and the following year she built her first work in São Paulo: the Casa de Vidro, her residence and now the headquarters of the foundation dedicated to her. the house is a sober and rational building that reveals Lina’s architectural choices: Bauhaus, Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe…

Such a large hall has its own rational logic, as well as aesthetics: the Casa de Vidro, in fact, must have belonged to the patron Assis Chateaubriand, owner of the Diários Associados, a chain of newspapers, magazines and television stations without equal at the time. This also explains the large round dining table, behind the fireplace, in Brazilian green marble accompanied by a series of Tuscan Savonarola chairs, and the Fifties kitchen, with industrial stoves, an enormous stainless steel counter, pure modern refrigerators, which they were supposed to guarantee representative lunches and dinners for the guests. All in contrast with the rooms, very small and essential, like monastic cells, and the rooms for the servants and the laundry

Lina Bo Bardi’s action has always been directed towards the creation of an authentic Brazilian culture, capable of enhancing one’s roots. “Nothing comes from nothing. True cultural zeroing will certainly not be achieved, it is impossible, with the tabula rasa of traditional structures at any moment (…). Authentically creative spirits have never reset, they have violently revolutionized, and revolution is violent subversion of the existing positive + the future” (Lina Bo Bardi, 1974)