2G n 23/24 Lina Bo Bardi

Lina Bo Bardi, an architect born in Rome in 1914, graduated from the Architecture Faculty of Rome University in 1940. Soon after this she moved to Milan, where she worked for Gio Ponti and edited the magazine Domus. The war over, she emigrated to Brazil in 1946 with her husband Pietro Maria Bardi, an art historian and critic. It was in Brazil, a country whose nationality she would later assume, that she developed her professional career in the field of architecture and industrial and interior design. The radical, modern focus of her work is impregnated with a wish to reconcile popular culture and everyday life, to do away with the distance between high and low culture. Her built architectural work possesses the conceptual and material forthrightness for which it is generally known, although she undertook a great many unbuilt projects. Only her built works are presented in this number of 2G. Foremost among these are probably the famous House of Glass (the Bardis’ own home), the MASP (São Paulo Art Museum) and the SESC Pompéia Factory, all of them in São Paulo.