Albert Frey

Daniell Cornell and Zeuler R. Lima

Albert Frey and Lina Bo Bardi: A Search For Living Architecture
and Lina Bo Bardi:
A Search for
Living Architecture

Albert Frey and Lina Bo Bardi: A Search for

Living Architecture examines the surprising
but compelling synergy in the visionary
building and design of these two midcentury
architects. It offers an unprecedented
exploration of their approaches to modernist
houses, furniture, public buildings, and
urban design. As immigrants to the Americas
from Europe who moved to what at the
time were newly developing regions, their
personal and professional odysseys are
representative of the emergence of São Paulo
and Southern California as architectural and
cultural laboratories that embraced social
and environmental contexts. Frey and

Delmonico • Prestel
Bo Bardi not only expanded the meaning and
practice of midcentury modernist structures;
they shared the belief that architecture is
more than a way to create singular designs
based in aesthetic principles. It is a way to
connect people, nature, building, and living.
Albert Frey
and Lina Bo Bardi:
A Search for
Living Architecture
A. Lawrence Kocher and Albert Frey, Aluminaire House, Long Island, NY, 1931 Lina Bo Bardi, Bardi House (Casa de vidro), São Paulo, Brazil, 1949–52, Lina at
Albert standing on roof deck, ca. 1933 living room windows, photograph by Francisco Albuquerque, 1952
Albert Frey, Frey House I, Palm Springs, CA, 1940–41/53, Bardi House (Casa de vidro), São Paulo, Brazil, 1949–52,
photograph by Julius Shulman, ca. 1954 photograph by Nelson Kon, 2002
 Albert Frey
and Lina Bo Bardi:
A Search for
Living Architecture

Daniell Cornell and Zeuler R. Lima

Essays by
Daniell Cornell
Zeuler R. Lima
Joseph Rosa
Cathrine Veikos
Sidney Williams

DelMonico Books • Prestel

Munich London New York

Veronika Kellndorfer, SESC Pompéia, Cylindropuntia Fulgida, 2016

This catalogue is published on
the occasion of the exhibition
9 Contents 11 Foreword and Acknowledgments
Albert Frey and Lina Bo Bardi:
Elizabeth Armstrong and Daniell Cornell
A Search for Living Architecture

Palm Springs Art Museum 17 Putting the Living into Architecture

Architecture and Design Center,
September 9, 2017 – January 7, 2018. Daniell Cornell
The exhibition is organized by
the Palm Springs Art Museum.

Published in 2017 by Palm Springs Art Museum 21 Constellations: An Invitation to

and DelMonico Books·Prestel
a Long-Awaited Dialogue
Palm Springs Art Museum
101 Museum Drive, Zeuler R. Lima
Palm Springs, CA 92262

DelMonico Books, an imprint of Prestel Publishing,

a member of Verlagsgruppe Random House GmbH
27 Publications Portfolio
Prestel Verlag
Neumarkter Strasse 28
81673 Munich
51 Albert Frey and Southern California
Prestel Publishing Ltd.
14–17 Wells Street Joseph Rosa
London W1T 3PD

Prestel Publishing
900 Broadway, Suite 603
New York, NY 10003
61 Aluminaire House Portfolio
www.prestel.com

Albert Frey and Lina Bo Bardi: A Search for Living Architecture is part of 73 Lina Bo Bardi: An Architect in
Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA, a far-reaching and ambitious exploration of
Latin American and Latino art in dialogue with Los Angeles, taking place from Midcentury São Paulo
September 2017 through January 2018 at more than 70 cultural institutions
across Southern California. Pacific Standard Time is an initiative of the Getty. Zeuler R. Lima
The presenting sponsor is Bank of America.

85 Bardi House (Casa de vidro) Portfolio

Additional funding for Albert Frey and Lina Bo Bardi: A Search for Living
Architecture is provided by Dr. Roswitha Kima Smale, Simon K. Chiu, 101 Living Architecture: Lina Bo Bardi
Palm Springs Art Museum Architecture and Design Council,
and Atelier 4 - Fine Art Logistics
and Albert Frey
Edited by: Daniell Cornell and Zeuler R. Lima Cathrine Veikos
Managing Editor: Daniell Cornell
Production Director: Karen Farquhar, DelMonico Books·Prestel
Art Director: Dung Ngo
Designer: Franklin Vandiver 113 Cirell House Portfolio
Copy Editor: Deanna Benjamin
Proofreading: Bethany Morse and Victoria Taormina
Indexing: Danielle Sommer
Bibliography: Frank Lopez
131 Albert Frey: Out West
© 2017 Palm Springs Art Museum and
Sidney Williams
Prestel Verlag, Munich · London · New York

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted

in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, 139 Frey House II Portfolio
recording, or any other information storage and retrieval system, or otherwise
without written permission from the publisher.

ISBN 978-3-7913567-5-4 161 The Poetry of Living: Photography and

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
the Architectural Spaces of Lina Bo Bardi
Names: Cornell, Daniell. | Lima, Zeuler Rocha
Mello de Almeida. | Rosa, Joseph. | Veikos, and Albert Frey
Cathrine. | Williams, Sidney. | Palm Springs Art
Museum, organizer, host institution. Daniell Cornell
Title: Albert Frey and Lina Bo Bardi : a search for
living architecture / Daniell Cornell and Zeuler R.
Lima ; essays by Daniell Cornell, Zeuler R. Lima,
Joseph Rosa, Cathrine Veikos, Sidney Williams.
177 Notes on Contributors
Description: Palm Springs : Palm Springs Art
Museum and DelMonico.Prestel, 2017. |
178 Image Credits
“This catalogue is published on the occasion of 180 List of Lenders
the exhibition Albert Frey and Lina Bo Bardi: A
Search for Living Architecture, Palm Springs Art 182 Exhibition Checklist
Museum Architecture and Design Center,
September 9, 2017-January 7, 2018.” | Includes 188 Bibliography
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017013340 | ISBN 190 Index
9783791356754 (hardcover)
Subjects: LCSH: Frey, Albert, 1903-1998--
Exhibitions. | International style (Architecture)--
California, Southern--Exhibitions. | Bardi, Lina Bo,
1914-1992--Exhibitions. | International style
(Architecture)--Brazil--Exhibitions.
Classification: LCC NA737.F74 A4 2017 | DDC
720.92/2--dc23 LC record available at
https://lccn.loc.gov/2017013340
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Cover:
Albert Frey with his 1936 Ford convertible, Palm Springs, CA, ca. 1936 (Detail);
Lina Bo Bardi, Bardi House (Casa de vidro), São Paulo, Brazil, 1949-52, Lina
leaning against a ground-floor piloti, photograph by Alice Brill, ca. 1952 (Detail)
 11 Foreword and Acknowledgments
Elizabeth Armstrong and Daniell Cornell
Albert Frey and Lina Bo Bardi: A Search for Living
Architecture is a unique exploration of two visionary
architects who imported modernist techniques that
they had studied in Europe to the new climates and
conditions of the Americas. Frey (1903–1998) emigrated
from Switzerland to the United States in 1930, and
Bo Bardi (1914–1992) from Italy to Brazil in 1946. Each
created modernist houses, furniture, public buildings,
and approaches to design that moved beyond modernist
doctrine to embrace the social and environmental
contexts specific to their adoptive homes in Southern
California and São Paulo.
Although the stories and personalities of these
two modernists are strikingly different, they embraced
similar concepts and overlapping passions. Over the past
decade, we have both become familiar and enthusiastic
about the work of each architect through visits to their
houses and public buildings in São Paulo and Palm
Springs. Intrigued to know more about these two iconic
architects, we contacted Zeuler R. Lima who had recently
published the first major book on Bo Bardi in the United
States with Yale University Press (2013) to ask if there
might be more than a formalist link between these two
European modernists. We were delighted to learn that
there were indeed significant connections, and ones
that Zeuler believed warranted further study. He was
also interested in the extent to which their personal and
professional odysseys were connected to the emergence
of broader spheres of influence in Southern California
and São Paulo as these areas became known for their
visionary architecture at midcentury.
Buoyed by Zeuler’s enthusiasm for the project, the
museum invited him to join us in this exploration of
these two influential and compelling figures. Though he
did not believe that they had ever met, Zeuler was aware
that Bo Bardi had written about Frey and even translated
parts of Frey’s treatise In Search of a Living Architecture
in the Italian magazine Domus. Despite their outsider
status as “cultural others” living in the Americas—or
perhaps because of it—Frey and Bo Bardi each designed
spaces that would have a major impact on the cultural
identity of their adoptive communities.
The Palm Springs Art Museum is honored to be
the owner and steward of Albert Frey’s Frey House II, an
iconic structure embedded above the museum in the
rugged landscape of the San Jacinto Mountains. The
museum itself, situated at the base of the mountain, is
a classic example of brutalist modernism by noted Palm
Albert Frey, Frey House I, Palm Springs, CA, 1940–41/53, Albert with his Austin
Springs architect E. Stewart Williams. Additionally, the
Healey convertible, photograph by Julius Shulman, ca. 1954
museum’s new Architecture and Design Center, which
opened in the fall of 2014, is housed in a rehabilitated,
midcentury modernist building by Williams, which pro-
vides the perfect envelope for this exhibition. Its estab-
lishment becomes an integral part of this community’s
preservation and celebration of its architectural legacy as
well as visionary thinking in the field. Through our collec-
tions, public programs, archives, and support of innova-
tive books and exhibitions such as Albert Frey and Lina Bo
Bardi: A Search for Living Architecture, the Palm Springs
Art Museum aspires to have an ongoing impact on the
vitality of the culture in this desert community.
We are indebted to the Getty Foundation for its
support of both a planning grant and the implementation
of this publication and exhibition. We are thrilled to be
part of the Getty’s influential programs taking place
throughout Southern California in the fall of 2017 under
the rubric Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA. Its planning
grant allowed us to organize a roundtable that brought
together a lively group of scholars and creative thinkers
including historians, curators, and practicing architects.
The resulting conversations around connections
between Albert Frey and Lina Bo Bardi and our subject
provided the conceptual framework for both this book
and the exhibition. We would like to thank the Getty’s
leadership team, working under the skillful and highly
organized guidance of Gloria Gerace, managing director
for Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA, for the many details
that were coordinated to bring so many institutions
together under a single vision while simultaneously
supporting more than eighty exhibitions, including
this one. That task also requires a special thank you to
Deborah Marrow, director, The Getty Foundation, Selene
Preciado, program assistant, and Heather MacDonald,
program assistant.
We are also extremely grateful to our other funders,
whose generosity and support of this project helped
in its realization. Dr. Roswitha Kima Smale, especially,
contributed significant support and cheered us on with
spirited passion. We are also extremely grateful to our
other funders, whose generosity and support of this
project helped in its realization. Board member Simon
K. Chiu provided crucial funds to help produce the
catalogue. Once again, the museum’s Architecture and
Design Council has stepped forward to allocate signifi-
cant exhibition support.
The exhibition also is indebted to the Getty-funded
roundtable participants, who provided the initial in-
sights leading to the exhibition. They include authors
of the essays in this book that explore Frey’s and Bo
Bardi’s shared belief in architecture as a way to connect
people, nature, building, and living: Dr. Zeuler R. Lima,
Associate Professor of Design & Visual Arts, Washington
 13 University in St. Louis; Dr. Daniell Cornell, Director of
Art, Palm Springs Art Museum; Joseph Rosa, Director,
Frye Art Museum in Seattle; Cathrine Veikos, Associate
Professor of Architecture and Chair of the Interior Design
Program, California College of the Arts in San Francisco;
and Sidney Williams, former Curator of Architecture and
Design, Palm Springs Art Museum. Other roundtable par-
ticipants whose presentations deepened the experience
of the exhibition and the catalogue included Barbara
Bestor, Clara Irazábal, Christian Larsen, Vera M. Pallamin,
Mark Rios, Sandra I. Vivanco, and Wim de Wit.
Based on the fruitful exchanges at that two-day
roundtable, Lima organized an essential research trip
to São Paulo, providing Cornell and Williams with the
firsthand knowledge of Lina Bo Bardi and her place
within the architectural community of that city necessary
to craft this exhibition around the relationship—largely
through professional journals and magazines—of Albert
Frey and Lina Bo Bardi. As one of the most informed
international scholars of Bo Bardi, Lima has been an
indispensable co-curator of the exhibition and co-editor
of this catalogue. It is not an exaggeration to say that the
project could not have happened without his erudition,
scholarship, and committed participation. He has ex-
tended an extraordinary professional graciousness to all
aspects of this project.
Similarly, Sidney Williams, in her role as exhibition
advisor has brought her extensive knowledge of Albert
Frey and the architectural history of Palm Springs to
the project. We have both benefited greatly from the
program Williams established as the founding cura-
tor of Architecture and Design at the Palm Springs Art
Museum. In addition, Williams worked diligently with
professors Lauren Bricker and Luis Hoyes at California
State Polytechnic University, Pomona, who oversaw
the students who produced the digital and physical
models in the exhibition, for the Aluminaire House:
Roland Argomaniz, Maryanne Ruiz Bartolome, Juan
Luis Ibarra, Alyssa Kinney, Kyle Ng, Clenel Williams,
Christina Younger; for Frey House II: Brenda Marlene
Alonso, Manuel De Jesus Araujo Zavala, Neal A.
AuBuchon, Stephanie Quibin Cortes, Prianka Kuttappa,
Nathan M. Spencer, Matthew Austin Mace; for the Bardi
House (Casa de vidro): Anna Budzinskaya, Juan Carlos
De Robles, Osvaldo Gutierrez Munoz, Jocelyn Lopez,
Socrates M. Medina, Kojchakorn Ngamnimitthum; and
for the Cirell House: Sonny Contreras, Javier Correa,
Daniel Sanchez, Andres Alexis Valdez III, and Youstina
Ashraf Youssef.
Other colleagues at the museum who have made
this exhibition possible include Jeb Bonner, deputy
director and chief financial officer, who provided admin-
Lina Bo Bardi at the carnival ball of Instituto de Arquitetos do Brasil,
istrative support at important junctures, Brooke Hodge,
photograph by Henri Ballot, 1948
director of Architecture and Design, who lent her pro-
fessional expertise to strengthen the project, as well as
Alicia Thomas, director of Collections and Exhibition
Management, and the exhibition’s project team led by
Elena Incardona, collections manager, who managed the
checklist, transportation of loans, and lender arrange-
ments with cheerful precision; Tom Johnson, exhibition
and installation manager, who oversaw the installation
and his crew—Juan Gonzales, Jim Mero, and Julianne
Aguilar—with his usual ingenuity and skill; Leonardo
Bravo, director of Education and Public Programs, who
brought creative energy to thinking about the public’s
engagement with the exhibition; and Frank Lopez, archi-
vist and museum librarian, who worked with Cal Poly
Pomona professors, students, and curators in the Frey
archive, compiled the bibliography, and tirelessly tracked
down copies of obscure journals and magazines that
are at the intellectual heart of the exhibition. In addi-
tion, Cara Gallo, curatorial administrator, kept an eye on
all the professional aspects with the attention to detail
on which the department daily relies. Bethany Morse,
Architecture and Design Council administrator, secured
and managed all of the images for the catalogue with im-
pressive thoroughness. Victoria Taormina, curatorial as-
sistant, brought consistency and order to the catalogue
texts. Arlene Amick, director of Audience Engagement
and Communications, helped to generate excitement
for the exhibition before it even opened. Roy Komassa,
publications manager, created the materials associated
with the exhibition with an awareness of design princi-
ples that both Frey and Bo Bardi would recognize. Leigh
Wiemann wrote the exhibition’s numerous fundraising
grants with an agility and economy that is enviable.
Michael Miner, director of Development, and Hugh
Wakeham, have resourcefully helped secure necessary
funding from corporate and private donors. Thanks also
to the museum’s director of Operations, Debra Preston,
and her talented team, led by Olivia Villarreal, who real-
ized the exhibition design.
Outside the museum staff, architect Barbara
Bestor, as a participant in the initial Albert Frey and Lina
Bo Bardi roundtable, demonstrated a contemporary
affinity for the ideas of these two innovative modernists,
which she and her team translated into the thoughtful
and sensitive design of the installation. Dung Ngo, art
director, and designer Franklin Vandiver have created this
catalogue’s sophisticated and effective design with an
informed attention to the subject matter and the period in
which the architects worked. The museum is fortunate to
work once again with Mary DelMonico and her associates,
Karen Farquhar, and Anne Wu, at DelMonico.Prestel,
which produced the book’s beautiful appearance. Deanna
Benjamin carefully edited the essays with an awareness
 15 of the poetic possibilities of language. We also thank
those involved in proofreading, including Brooke Hodge,
Victoria Taormina, Bethany Morse, Mara Gladstone,
Sidney Williams, and Danielle Sommer.
However, no exhibition is possible without the
generosity of its lenders, who entrust their treasured
objects to the museum for the benefit of the general
public, scholars, and informed audiences. Foremost
among those are the two foundations that have
embraced the vision of the exhibition and provided
much of the original archival materials. Anna Carboncini
at the Instituto Lina Bo and P. M. Bardi in São Paulo
welcomed our curatorial team warmly during our
research trip and in recognition of the historic nature
of this exhibition worked magnanimously to make
their numerous loans economically feasible. Jocelyn
Gibbs, curator, Architecture and Design Collection, Art,
Design, & Architecture Museum, University of California,
Santa Barbara, opened the Albert Frey archives housed
there with a collegial spirit that has richly benefited
the exhibition. Marianne Martin, visual resources
librarian at the Kocher Archive, Colonial Williamsburg
Library, facilitated the loan of key Albert Frey drawings
documenting his early career. Michael Schwarting
and Frances Campani at the Aluminaire Foundation
have not only been an important source of primary
documents, but they have been tireless champions
of the house and its odyssey from New York to Palm
Springs. Several other lenders deserve special mention
for accommodating us above and beyond standard
loan practices. They include: Iwan Baan, Brad Dunning,
Christopher Grimes Gallery, Deborah Irmas, Veronika
Kellndorfer, Nelson Kon, and Michael Maloney.

On a personal note, Elizabeth Armstrong would like
to add to these acknowledgements her deep appreciation
of Daniell Cornell for his enthusiastic and tireless care of
this ambitious project. His agile intellect and steadfast
commitment has resulted in both this unique publication
and dynamic exhibition.
Daniell Cornell would like to add the following per-
sonal note: Thanks to Rudy Rodriguez, who has stood
with me throughout more than twenty years of curatorial
projects. I see his patient support and intelligent voice
manifest everywhere in this exhibition and catalogue as
he continues to be the loving partner who puts the life in
my living.

Albert Frey, Frey House II, Palm Springs, CA, 1963-64/72

photograph by Julius Shulman, 1965
 17 Putting the Living into Architecture
Daniell Cornell
Albert Frey and Lina Bo Bardi: A Search for Living
Architecture examines the surprising but compelling
synergy in the visionary building and design of these
two midcentury architects. It offers an unprecedented
exploration of their approaches to modernist houses,
furniture, public buildings, and urban design. As
immigrants from Europe who moved to what at the
time were newly developing regions, their personal
and professional odysseys are representative of the
emergence of São Paulo and Southern California as
architectural and cultural laboratories that embraced
social and environmental contexts. Frey and Bo
Bardi not only expanded the meaning and practice of
midcentury modernist structures; they shared the belief
that architecture is more than a way to create singular
designs based in aesthetic principles. It is a way to
connect people, nature, building, and living.
Living Architecture tells this story through a com-
bination of sketches, 3-D models, computer-generated
drawings, design objects, and historic and contempo-
rary photographs. These works are supplemented by
important architecture and design publications that
disseminated their ideas and innovative projects to an
international audience. Four domestic structures provide
the starting point for this exhibition: the glass-walled
houses that Frey and Bo Bardi built for themselves in
Palm Springs and São Paulo respectively; Bo Bardi’s
Cirell House in São Paulo; and Frey’s Aluminaire House,
which its historical foundation plans to relocate to Palm
Springs. Together these structures convey departure
points for understanding how the conception of living
architecture evolved for Frey and Bo Bardi and help to
illustrate their crucial interest in fostering architecture
by re-imagining it through the transformation of the
modern house—the epitome of modern living—and
its unfolding into public buildings, urban spaces, and
natural landscapes.
This catalogue provides the larger context for the
more focused exhibition, opening up the practices of
both architects beyond their featured residential projects.
Zeuler R. Lima and Joseph Rosa situate Lina Bo Bardi
and Albert Frey within the constellation of architects
who defined the modern aesthetics of their regions,
São Paulo and Southern California, respectively. Lima
and Rosa who, through attention to techniques and
materials, geography and climate, aesthetic vision and
social life, trace how Frey’s and Bo Bardi’s creative
designs participated in the development of international
Lina Bo Bardi, Bardi House (Casa de vidro), São Paulo, Brazil, 1949–52,
modernism even as they looked to the vernacular
photograph by Nelson Kon, 2002
concerns of an architecture rooted in everyday human
life. Cathrine Veikos offers a close reading of the
methodology in the writings of Frey and Bo Bardi,
focusing on how both architects considered physical
and spiritual needs and rejected attention to style as
superficial and decorative in favor of organic designs
that incorporate the conditions of climate, topography,
landscape, and life. Sidney Williams details Frey’s history
in Europe, especially with Le Corbusier, and in America,
first in New York and then Palm Springs, tracing his
lifelong fascination with engineering technologies and
the use of prefabricated designs that rely on industrial
materials even as he admired the way vernacular
architecture expressed the local climate and landscape.
As a summary of design principles in Frey and Bo Bardi,
my essay analyzes how the photographers whose
images comprise, in part, this exhibition reveal the
phenomenology of architectural spaces through their
compositions.
Albert Frey and Lina Bo Bardi: A Search for Living
Architecture has been organized as one of the key
exhibitions to be featured in Pacific Standard Time:
LA/LA, an initiative of the J. Paul Getty Trust. We are
grateful for their financial support of the exhibition,
which also included a planning grant for research and
a round table where scholars and practicing architects
vetted the initial ideas of the exhibition. We are honored
to join with the other arts organizations in this endeavor
across Southern California, from Santa Barbara to
San Diego, and from Los Angeles to Palm Springs, in
presenting a far-reaching exploration of Latin American
and Latino art as it relates to the art and culture of our
region. Consistent with the goals of PST: LA/LA, the
exhibition offers a fresh look at, and reinvestigation of,
these remarkable architects and their respective milieux.
 19

Lina Bo and Pietro Maria Bardi arriving in São Paulo, 1947 Albert Frey arriving at Ellis Island, NY, 1930
 21
Albert Frey, perspective drawing for In Search of a Living Architecture (1939)
Lina Bo Bardi, perspective drawing for Domus, no. 192 (December 1943) based
on illustrations from Albert Frey’s In Search of a Living Architecture (1939)
Constellations: An Invitation to
a Long-Awaited Dialogue
Zeuler R. Lima
Albert Frey and Lina Bo Bardi never met in person,
but their intellectual and professional paths crossed
in meaningful ways. In 1944, Bo Bardi was the co-
editor of Domus magazine in Milan and published
a full translation of Frey’s book In Search of a Living
Architecture (1939) for her Italian audience. She
recreated a few of his book drawings from the article
and added color to them, as seen on the pages that
accompany this introduction and on page 33 of this
catalogue. She had also previously edited a couple of
pieces with references to Frey’s work and writing (pp.
34–35). A couple of years later, when Ernesto N. Rogers
took Domus magazine’s leadership, two articles about
Bo Bardi’s and Frey’s work—a Milan Triennale exhibition
stall and a California desert house respectively and as
shown on shown on pages 39 and 40—appeared next to
each other in subsequent spreads. These adjacent pieces
still seem, over a half century later, to eavesdrop on one
another’s talk over their work desks and to suggest the
longing for a conversation. Despite not knowing each
other, they shared—sometimes literally—similar design
principles and aspirations.
Seven decades after those publications, this cata-
logue and exhibition—conceived by the Palm Springs
Art Museum and motivated by the Getty Foundation’s
program to examine artistic connections between Los
Angeles and Latin America—propose to foster the un-
spoken dialogue between those two European architects
who migrated to different parts of the Americas. This op-
portunity unveils the multiple developments of modern
architecture around the world as well as the meaningful
though little-known architectural exchanges among
Europe, the United States, and Brazil. By featuring two
houses designed by Albert Frey and two by Lina Bo
Bardi, this project takes us into the inner worlds of their
design thinking and practice and out toward the constel-
lations of the cultural and professional relationships in
which they participated through their personal odysseys.
Frey moved to the United States in the early 1930s
and Bo Bardi emigrated to Brazil after the end of World
War II. He was Swiss, rigorous, and methodical. She was
Italian, passionate, and intuitive. He was a decade her
senior and initially worked in New York City, discovering
later the landscapes and climate of the American West.
She spent most of her professional life in São Paulo
and was fond of the Brazilian hinterlands and the genu-
ine, everyday culture of her new country. Though their
architectural vocabularies were different, both designers
shared a common value system. They sought to integrate
architecture, landscape, and people through straightfor-
ward construction techniques and practices that helped
to transform the architectural culture in their adoptive
countries.
Their design affinities and searches converged early
in their careers into the notion of a living architecture,
evident in the publications and house projects featured
in this volume. Frey was one of the pioneers of des-
ert modernism in Southern California. His architecture
embraced the surrounding landscape and experiment-
ed with natural and industrial materials as he created
elegantly detailed structures. Bo Bardi produced idio-
syncratic works in Brazil, which strived to merge modern
and traditional forms and industrial and natural materials
in an architecture conceived as a stage for everyday life.
Two houses by Albert Frey are featured in this
project and are connected intimately to the Palm
Springs Art Museum: (1) his experimental, prefabricated
Aluminaire House (1931) designed in partnership with
A. Lawrence Kocher (originally for a building fair in New
York City), which was in transit to be installed in front
of the museum while this catalogue was produced and
(2) his second residence, Frey House II (1963–64), which
he donated to the museum at his passing. This volume
also features two houses by Lina Bo Bardi: (1) the Bardi
House (1952)—often known as the Glass House (or
Casa de vidro), which she designed for her husband
P. M. Bardi and herself in São Paulo, and (2) the Cirell
House (1957), which she designed for her neighbor and
friend, Valéria Cirell. Separated by three decades and
the whole continent in the case of Frey’s houses and by
five years and 300 meters in Bo Bardi’s examples, these
four structures show how each architect interpreted
the notion of a living architecture and how their design
practices evolved from abstract, early functionalist
principles to site-specific and figurative works. They also
offer meaningful stepping stones to venture into the still
little-explored relationships that existed between the
architectural developments in Southern California and
São Paulo during the period after the Second World War.
As the United States survived the 1930s Great
Depression and emerged as a world power at the
end of the war, Southern California became a cultural
laboratory and home to the innovative talents of
architects such as Albert Frey, Richard Neutra, and
Rudolph Schindler as demonstrated in Joseph Rosa’s
essay. Together, such foreign architects along with US-
trained designers merged European aesthetic and North
American inventiveness into an architecture significantly
concerned with health, climate, and landscape, departing
from the predominant architectural narratives of the
East Coast, especially New York. Designers such as
 23 Frey helped to transform the symbolic and physical
landscape of an entire region and to create a particular
representation of American domesticity—one that was
idyllically close to the natural environment with its
framed views of distant horizons and staged the cultured
social life of carefree individuals. Such designers also
stimulated developments abroad, namely in regions with
comparable natural geography and social aspirations.
Brazil was one of the countries to welcome those
influences. The end of the Second World War brought
to an end Getúlio Vargas’s fifteen years of autocratic
regime, which had embraced modern European
architecture as part of its nation-building project. In
this postwar environment, as presented in this author’s
essay, São Paulo attracted several second-generation
modern European architects, including Lina Bo Bardi,
and saw the emergence of local talents, while the city
boomed as an industrial and financial capital and cultural
laboratory under the sway of United States geopolitical
interests. Architectural experimentation moved from
Rio de Janeiro to São Paulo, where professional
education originally came out of engineering programs
and artistic influences shifted from Le Corbusier’s
philosophical tenets to Nelson A. Rockefeller’s pragmatic
practices. Shortly after the war, Rockefeller sponsored
several cultural programs in Brazil, such as stimulating
the creation of museums of modern art—one of them
being the Museum of Art of São Paulo, which was
responsible for keeping Bo Bardi and her husband in
Brazil—and funding trips made by Richard Neutra to
São Paulo to establish contact with Brazilian architects.
Among the architects who became close to Neutra
was Oswaldo Bratke, who helped diffuse the interest
in Southern Californian domestic architecture among
the new Paulistano generation and made a particular
impression on Bo Bardi’s design for her house in the
Morumbi subdivision (which Bratke had developed).
Despite such influence, in the early 1950s, Bo Bardi
developed her own architectural language and approach
to space and living, as announced in the Cirell House
and advanced in her subsequent projects.
Before Lina Bo Bardi designed her house in
Morumbi, merging her interest in rural architecture and
the growing influence of modern houses from Southern
California among São Paulo architects, she had an
editorial career in Italy already informed by architectural
developments in the American West. As Cathrine Veikos’s
essay demonstrates, Bo Bardi had been critically familiar
with that production before her Brazilian colleagues,
especially quoting and adapting Albert Frey’s writings,
drawings, and projects (among those other California-
Albert Frey, perspective drawing for In Search of a Living Architecture (1939)
based architects) in her publications for Domus and other
Lina Bo Bardi, elevation and perspective drawing for Domus, no. 192
(December 1943) based on illustrations from Albert Frey’s In Search of a
Italian magazines in the early 1940s. From the outset,
Living Architecture (1939)
Bo Bardi framed the architecture across the northern
Atlantic Ocean within the particular discourse developed
in Italy in preparation for postwar reconstruction, which
had the strong imprint of U.S. geopolitical interests
and searched for the continuity between tradition and
modernization. She maintained that viewpoint when she
moved to Brazil. The overlap and divergence between
Frey’s and Bo Bardi’s approaches to the opportunities of
the Americas, their interpretations of the notion of living
architecture, and their discourses and practices speak to
their national origins, the timing of their migration, and
their internal and external positions in relationship to the
United States. In this sense, the analogies between the
Italian and Brazilian as well as Northern European and
North American professional and intellectual contexts
may shed light on the reasons why Frey and Bo Bardi
respectively thrived in their adoptive countries.
A couple of years after moving to New York in 1930,
Albert Frey discovered the American West. As Sidney
Williams’s essay describes, that discovery represented a
transformative experience in his life and career. Though
the Western landscape had been part of his childhood
imagination, it was his education in Switzerland that
exposed him to the work and writings of German-
language architects, such as Richard Neutra, who had
moved to California. After having worked on housing
projects in Belgium and collaborating with Le Corbusier,
Frey lent his passion for building technology and
prefabrication to his American professional partnerships.
In New York, while with A. Lawrence Kocher, he designed
the paradigmatic Aluminaire House and the Kocher
Canvas Weekend House (used to illustrate one of Bo
Bardi’s articles for Domus in 1943). This association
took Frey to Palm Springs in 1935 to supervise their
project for Kocher’s brother’s house. He established
himself in the city and developed projects with other
local modernist architects. Soon after his move, Frey
wrote In Search of a Living Architecture, articulating his
theory of space, form, and structure based on natural
shapes, traditional building practices, and contemporary
techniques. In Palm Springs, Frey developed an
architectural language that embraced the desert
landscape, combining industrial and natural materials
and physically adapting itself to the local landscape and
climate with a clear sense of building economy and of
visual poetry.
Ultimately, both Frey and Bo Bardi aimed at
elevating everyday life to a poetic state through
their projects, especially the houses they designed
for themselves and their clients. As Daniell Cornell
demonstrates in his essay, photography has been a
meaningful medium for revealing the lyricism and
the experience of architecture, exploring how five
 25 photographers, whose works are in the Palm Springs
Art Museum archives, approached the houses by Frey
and Bo Bardi. Julius Shulman created anthological
images of California architecture and of Frey’s projects
in particular, carefully composing them with contrasts
of light and shadow to feature a paradigmatic
representation of mid-twentieth-century living. Nelson
Kon documents Brazilian architecture, and in particular
the work of Bo Bardi, revealing—even if never portraying
people—the atmosphere of living in her houses. François
Halard plunges into the intimacy of Frey House II to
uncover its poetic relationship with everyday life and the
surrounding landscape. Veronika Kellndorfer’s interest
in portraying architectural transparencies reveals the
ambiguous coincidences and thresholds between
Frey’s and Bo Bardi’s glass-walled houses. Iwan Baan’s
interest in creating visual narratives through his
photographs suggests that Frey’s long inhabitation of
his second house persists in the in-between spaces amid
the building and its surrounding landscape. Altogether,
these artistic photographs go beyond the forms they
represent to suggest the openness and multiplicity of the
experiences they embody.
The historical and geographical facts and the
artistic purpose and exchanges presented in the
essays and images in this exhibition catalogue are an
invitation to appreciate the odysseys and works of two
influential, twentieth-century architects. Above all, they
open up questions about the constellations of personal,
professional, and cultural relationships among different
countries in Europe and the Americas to be explored
by other architects, artists, curators, and scholars in
the future. The small houses designed by Frey and Bo
Bardi contain the complexity of the world in themselves.
Their understanding and their experience are never
completed. And that is what makes the growing interest
in the works by both architects simultaneously intriguing
and captivating.

Albert Frey, perspective drawing for In Search of a Living Architecture (1939)

Lina Bo Bardi, perspective solids drawing for Domus, no. 192

(December 1943) based on illustrations from Albert Frey’s In Search of a
Living Architecture (1939)
27
Publications
Albert Frey and Lina Bo Bardi
 29

Albert Frey, In Search of a Living Architecture (New York: Architectural Book Albert Frey, In Search of a Living Architecture (New York: Architectural Book
Publishing Company, Inc., 1939): cover Publishing Company, Inc., 1939): 10–13
 31

Albert Frey, In Search of a Living Architecture (New York: Architectural Book Albert Frey, In Search of a Living Architecture (New York: Architectural Book
Publishing Company, Inc., 1939): 33 Publishing Company, Inc., 1939): 68
33

Lina Bo and Carlo Pagani, “Alla ricerca di una architettura vivente” (In Search of
a Living Architecture), Domus, no. 192 (December 1943): 498–499
35

Lina Bo and Carlo Pagani, “Case sui trampoli” (Houses on Stilts), Domus, no. 195 (March 1944): 86–87
37

Lina Bo and Carlo Pagani, “Terrazze in Città” (Terraces in the City),

Lo Stile, no. 4 (April 1941): 70–71
 39

Domus, no. 213 (September 1946): cover “Casa in California” (House in California), Domus, no. 213 (September 1946): 3
 41

Lina Bo and Carlo Pagani, “Idee di mobili dal taccuino dell’architetto” (Ideas of
“Al Palazzo dell’Arte” (At the Palace of Art), Domus, no. 213 (September 1946): 6 Furniture from the Architect’s Notebook), Lo Stile, no. 24 (December 1942): 29
 43

Lo Stile, no. 11 (November 1951): cover Habitat, no.8 (July–September 1952): cover
 45

Interiors 113, no. 4 (November 1953): cover “Free-Tilting Cuddle Bowl,” Interiors 113, no. 4 (November 1953): 98
47

“Built in Brazil: A Light Glass Casa in the Air,” Interiors 112, no. 10 (May 1953): 74–75
 49

Dan McMasters, “This House Conforms to the Nature of the Desert,” Los Dan McMasters, “This House Conforms to the Nature of the Desert,” Los
Angeles Times Magazine (October 3, 1965): 58 Angeles Times Magazine (October 3, 1965): 60
61
Albert Frey
Aluminaire House, 1931
Architectural and Allied Arts Exposition,
New York City
 63

View of front entrance and double-height living-room windows,

Perspective sketch of exterior, ca. 1930 photograph by Palmer Shannon, ca. 1931
 65

“The Future,” Popular Mechanics 56, no. 2 (August 1931): 277,

Axonometric drawing showing interior, ca. 1930 illustration by Logan U. Reaves
 67

A. Lawrence Kocher and Albert Frey, Inflatable Seating

Based on Rubber Toys & Pads, 1931 Elevation and Plan of Mirror, 1931
 69

Conceptual sketch of kitchen, ca. 1930 Conceptual sketch of exercise room and bathroom, ca. 1930
 71

Perspective sketch of living room, ca. 1930 Perspective sketch of roof deck, ca. 1930
85
Lina Bo Bardi
Bardi House (Casa de vidro), 1949–52
Morumbi, São Paulo, Brazil
87

View from the northeast, photograph by Nelson Kon, 2002

89

Conceptual study for a low-cost housing development with perspective views

of an individual unit, 1951
 91

Elevation study for terraced gardens, 1951 Elevation and perspective studies for terraced gardens, 1951
 93

Lina Bo Bardi at living-room windows,

photograph by Francisco Albuquerque, 1952
 95

Lina Bo Bardi on entrance stairway,

Conceptual perspective study for interior, ca. 1949 photograph by Francisco Albuquerque, 1952
 97

Conceptual study for interior with Lina Bo and P. M. Bardi in Lina Bo Bardi leaning against a ground-floor piloti,
the foreground, ca. 1949 photograph by Alice Brill, ca. 1952
99

Veronika Kellndorfer, installation view of Cinematic

Framing [exhibition in Bardi House (Casa de vidro)], 2015,
photograph by Gerhard Heusch
 101
1 A. Lawrence Kocher and Albert Frey, Kocher Canvas Weekend House,
Northport, NY, 1934
2 Albert Frey, Frey House I, Palm Springs, CA, 1940–41/53,
photograph by Julius Shulman, ca. 1954
Living Architecture:
Lina Bo Bardi and Albert Frey
Cathrine Veikos
LAND-CLIMATE-ENVIRONMENT-LIFE
Lina Bo Bardi and Albert Frey were not exactly contem-
poraries. It is unlikely that they ever met, yet the constel-
lation of architects that dominated their formative ex-
periences led them to contemplate similar architectural
issues and to produce work—both buildings and texts—
that highlighted the potential of productive relationships
between architecture and its environmental and social
conditions. There is evidence that Lina Bo Bardi was
aware of Albert Frey’s first houses through international
periodicals and publications, and read at least parts of
Frey’s book, In Search of a Living Architecture (1939).
Both architects admired expressions of modern architec-
ture that were attuned to the land and to the materials
and practices of everyday life. Each wrote a richly illus-
trated text as a guide to architectural practices, taking
equal advantage of the unprecedented possibilities of
modern techniques and materials and of the undeniable
value of traditional architecture. To do so, each described
a design methodology that included taking careful ac-
count of the topography and the existing conditions of
the surrounding landscape while shaping space for both
physical and spiritual human needs.
Parallel Journeys
Early in his architectural career, Frey was one of the
few full-time paid employees in Le Corbusier’s Paris
office (October 1928–July 1929). His education at the
Institute of Technology in Winterthur, Switzerland, and
his experience with building construction, there and
in Brussels, were useful to the practice; he worked
closely with Le Corbusier on the Moscow Centrosoyus
Administration building, the Villa Savoye and the
housing at the League of Nations building. Frey drew
on the U.S. trade publication, Sweet’s Catalogue, for
developing the hardware details for the windows and for
the large sliding-glass door in the living room at the Villa
Savoye. He was enthusiastic about the technologically
progressive building environment in America, and
when his 1928 application for a visa came through
in 1930, he immigrated to the United States, working
first in New York for A. Lawrence Kocher, architect and
editor of Architectural Record, and later settling in Palm
Springs, a bachelor still in his early 30s. Le Corbusier
remained a supportive mentor and praised Kocher and
Frey’s Aluminaire House (1931), and the Kocher Canvas
Weekend House (1934)1 (fig. 1) as well as Frey House I,
(1940) (fig. 2), in his correspondence.2
In 1939, Albert Frey curated a wide-ranging
collection of photographs of buildings, machines and
landscapes into a book titled In Search of a Living
Architecture (see Publications portfolio, pp. 28–31). He
set down his thoughts about the evolution of archi-
tectural form and its relationship to nature, traditional
architecture, modern technics, and human needs,
including original diagrams to illustrate the concepts that
guided the forms of his architectural work. Frey contin-
ued to experiment with the industrial materials of the
Aluminaire House and with corrugated aluminum, pre-
fabricated wall panels, and glass in his commissions in
the desert landscape of Palm Springs, first at the domes-
tic scale and later at the civic scale. Between 1939 and
1986 he designed schools, hospitals, the Palm Springs
City Hall (1957), the Palm Springs Aerial Tramway Valley
Station (1963), and several desert homes, including his
own, Frey House II (1963–64/1972) (see Frey House II
portfolio, pp. 139–159).
Roughly ten years younger than Frey, the young
Lina Bo [Bardi]’s architectural education at the Scuola
superiore di architettura di Roma (Architecture College
of Rome) coincided with the difficult years of Mussolini’s
regime, from 1933 until 1940. Unlike Frey, later she
experienced the destruction of Europe firsthand at the
outset of her professional career. Traditional tenets of the
novecento prevailed at the school, with ambientismo—
that is, the environment of Italian cities—being seen as
a primary cultural value. Among her professors were
Marcello Piacentini, Dean of the School, and Gustavo
Giovannoni. Giovannoni’s important book, Vecchie
città ed edilizia nuova (New Buildings in Old Cities)
(1913), proposed the city as a palimpsest of old and
new and the idea of urban form as transitional, making
manifest its previous iterations, rather than absolute.3
This complementarity between old and new—as
well as the importance of the physical attributes of
landscapes and regional materials and the influence
of colors and workmanship in the formulation of an
architectural language—had a strong influence on Lina
Bo [Bardi], and she regarded Giovannoni as one of her
most important teachers.4 Lina Bo [Bardi] worked for
Piacentini on the 1942 Esposizione universale project
(E42) but was soon dismayed by the eclecticism and
monumentality of Piacentini’s work, which dominated
the scene in Rome, and in the early 1940s, she jumped
at the opportunity to move to Milan with classmate
Carlo Pagani to work with the modern architect Gio
Ponti. There, she made illustrations and wrote reviews,
articles, and critical texts on architecture and design for
the magazines he directed, including Domus and Lo Stile
(see Publications portfolio, pp. 27–49). Throughout the
1940s and 1950s, architect-editors like Ponti sustained a
 103 rich architectural discourse with multiple and nuanced
positions concerning the political potency of architecture:
Piacentini in the magazine Architettura, Giuseppe
Pagano, followed by Ernesto Rogers, in Casabella, and
Bruno Zevi in Metron and L’architettura cronache e storia.
Lina Bo [Bardi]’s formative years were shaped by robust
debates on architecture and planning related to the
postwar reconstruction that defined architectural practice
as expressly polemical.
Like many of her modernist contemporaries, Lina
Bo [Bardi] was particularly influenced by the works
of Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, Mies van der
Rohe, and Walter Gropius, but she was no acolyte.
Her early work and writing attests to the historically
inflected and materially distinct direction she conceived
for modernism. Like Frey, she was attracted to the
architectural possibilities of the Americas and emigrated
while still in her early 30s, but she did so as a married
woman, in keeping with social mores of the period,
which made unaccompanied travel by young, single
women difficult. In 1946, she moved to South America
as the wife of Pietro Maria (P. M.) Bardi, a prominent
journalist and art dealer fifteen years her senior and
a figure who had famously agitated within the Fascist
party for modernism as the architectural expression
of the Italian Fascist state.5 Arriving with him into the
3 Lina Bo Bardi, Didactic Exhibition of the History of Art at MASP,
São Paulo, Brazil, 1947, photograph by Peter Scheier, 1947 wealthy and powerful circle of Brazilian industrialists
and art collectors provided Lina Bo [Bardi] with both
major commissions and media coverage. Among
4 Lina Bo Bardi, Bardi House (Casa de vidro), São Paulo, Brazil,
her formative professional experiences were the
1949–52, photograph by Peter Scheier, 1951 architectural exhibitions she designed with husband P.
M. Bardi, who served as curator in the early years of the
Museum of Art of São Paulo at the Diários Associados
Building, including Le Corbusier’s New World of Space,
and Richard Neutra’s Residences in the late 1940s.
They also designed exhibitions for architect and artist
Max Bill, an Aristide Maillol retrospective, and The
Architecture of Gardens, Roberto Burle Marx as well as
a series of educational exhibitions including Didactic
Exhibition of the History of Art (fig. 3) and Industrial
Design (1900–1950), which display Bo Bardi’s early
use of industrial materials like Vis (a tempered-glass
product), aluminum tubing, copper, and rubber.6 Bo
Bardi also embraced indigenous natural materials in her
design, using Brazilian pau-marfim flooring, and paulista
jacaranda wood and atanado (a leather prepared with
Brazilian oak bark powder) for modern furniture for the
deployable chairs in the museum’s auditorium.7
Bo Bardi’s architectural practice in Brazil (1946–
1992) was bold and discursive, although the quantity
of her built work is slight compared to her male
contemporaries. Her major works are in São Paulo,
5 Lina Bo Bardi, SESC Pompéia, São Paulo, Brazil, 1977–86,
photograph by Cathrine Veikos, 2005 including the Bardi House or Glass House (Casa de
vidro) of 1951–52 in the suburb of Morumbi (fig. 4), the
iconic Museum of Art of São Paulo (MASP) on Avenida
Paulista, completed in 1968, and the confident Social
Service for Commerce Building in Pompéia (1977–86)
(fig. 5). In the years of the right-wing military dictatorship
of the country, 1964 through 1979, Bo Bardi did major
projects elsewhere in Brazil that are less known but
equally significant. They include the Cirell House (1958),
also in Morumbi (see Cirell House portfolio, pp. 113–29);
the House of Chame-Chame (1958, destroyed, ca.1984);
the Solar do Unhão, Bahia Museum of Modern Art, and
Museum of Popular Art (1959–63); and the powerful-
yet-modest brick and concrete church, Espirito Santo do
Cerrado, in Uberlândia, Minas Gerais (1976–82).8
Alongside her initial architectural projects, Bo Bardi
co-founded and edited the magazine, Habitat (1950)9 (see
Publications portfolio, pp. 27–49) and wrote the academic
text, Contribuição propedêutica ao ensino da teoria da
arquitetura (Propaedeutic Contribution to the Teaching of
Architectural Theory) (1957; see p. 110, fig. 11).10 Despite
the fact that Bo Bardi engaged international practices
and theories with her own writing and completed
designs for significant buildings, interiors, furniture, and
exhibitions, she remained relatively obscure outside of
Brazil during her lifetime. The fact that she was Italian,
a woman, and married to a controversial former Italian
Fascist cannot be underestimated as reasons for this
glaring oversight. In comparison to Albert Frey’s writing
and his architectural work in California, the temporal
currency of Bo Bardi’s work highlights her commitment
to the practical and honest expression of materials,
simple forms, and an openness to the rough beauty
of the natural landscape. Bo Bardi coined the Brazilian
term arquitetura pobre (or poor architecture) to describe
these qualities in her architectural work, saying that she
“always opted for direct, raw solutions.”11
Documented Overlaps between Frey and Bo [Bardi]
During her time co-directing Domus, from January 1944
to December 1945, Lina Bo [Bardi] published images
of the Kocher Canvas Weekend House (1934)12 and
translated excerpts of his book, In Search of a Living
Architecture, for an article with the same title.13 Signed
unobtrusively with only their initials, L.B.C.P., Lina Bo
[Bardi] and Carlo Pagani translated and re-formatted
Frey’s text and drawings. Bo [Bardi] focused on the first
fourteen pages of the book and added emphasis and
capitalization to the words form, space, and composition
whenever they appeared. She added an image of a
sculpture by Swiss artist and architect, Max Bill, and
redrew, colored, and in some cases reversed and re-
organized the black-and-white drawings from Frey’s book
(fig. 6). Bo [Bardi] added her own watercolor drawing
 105
6 Albert Frey, In Search of a Living Architecture (New York: Architectural
Book Publishing Company, Inc., 1939): 10–13
7 Lina Bo Bardi, “Architettura e natura: La casa nel paesaggio”
(Architecture and Nature: The house within the landscape),
Domus, no. 191 (November 1943): 464
of a shifting, green, rectilinear shape and a complex
geometrical figure of overlapping curves on a two-tone
reddish background (see Publications portfolio, p. 33).
In another article titled, “Interior accommodations,”
Bo [Bardi] presented the interiors of modern homes
by Gropius, Mies, Le Corbusier, Alfred Roth, and Franco
Albini as well as American homes by Richard Neutra,
Rudolph Schindler, and Carl Koch, highlighting the
importance of the windows and how they allow
for the creation of an environment which includes the
participation of the outside world and nature. 14
Reproducing Frey’s graphic layout of text and
image from In Search of a Living Architecture, Bo
[Bardi] re-created images of the dirigible and the
elevated farmhouse to accompany the publication of
Frey’s Kocher Canvas Weekend House, titled “Case
sui trampoli”(Houses on stilts).15 Consistent with the
vernacular and Italian precedents pictured, the Kocher
Canvas Weekend House appears amongst assorted
wooden farmhouses perched above ground, the Gothic-
Romanesque Broletto in Como, Le Corbusier’s Villa
Savoye, and Figini’s Casa a Milano (see Publications
portfolio, pp. 34–35).
Though she worked for Ponti in Milan, Lina Bo
[Bardi] was partial to the intellectual position that Pagano
promoted in Casabella, a return to architettura rurale
(rural architecture) in concert with modern geometry
and building construction technology as a route to
practical and pure architecture.16 Pagano had been
selected to design part of E42 and was critical
of Piacentini’s contributions to the project, calling
his work “reactionary and historicist” in Costruzioni
Casabella.17 Pagano changed the name of the magazine
in 1938 to reflect a builder’s priorities, publishing
details and construction drawings of modern buildings
in addition to photos. In its monthly series called
“architettura mondiale,” Pagano (and co-editor, Eduardo
Persico) featured California houses, including Richard
Neutra’s Kaufmann House (1947), Neutra and Gregory
Ain’s Glendale House, and Hervey Parke Clark’s House
for Roger Kent. Casabella was the first in Italy to feature
the Long Island Weekend House, Albert Frey’s
work with A.L. Kocher, in July 1943.18 At around the
same time in Italy, after a summer of an intensive
Allied bombing of Milan that destroyed much of the
city, Lina Bo [Bardi] published the article, “Architecture
and nature: The house within the landscape.”19
In it, she signaled her intentions for the kind of
architectural expression she envisioned for the Italian
Reconstruction—a new beginning with the opportunity
to reconcile functionalism with the natural forms of the
landscape. Similar to the way Frey presents vernacular
constructions in his book’s chapter, “The Value of
Traditional Architecture,” Bo [Bardi] presents eleven
buildings to accompany her manifesto-like text. The
first few are vernacular constructions from Italy, India,
and Mexico. All the other examples are from the United
States: California and New Mexico.20 After the war and
Bo Bardi’s departure to Brazil in September 1946, the
new editor of Domus, Ernesto Rogers, published, on
consecutive pages of the magazine, Bo Bardi’s design
for the Rhodoid stand at the Palazzo dell’Arte exhibition
and Albert Frey’s Frey House I as “House in California”
(see Publications portfolio, pp. 38–40). 21
Architecture and Nature: Texts and Houses
Modern structures and natural settings are direct
opposites, a contrast which emphasizes the precise
appearance of the buildings and the irregular
expressions of nature, to the advantage of both.
Albert Frey, In Search of a Living Architecture, 1939
In our times, a more realistic approach will restore
the relationship between architecture and LAND-
CLIMATE-ENVIRONMENT-LIFE, thus destroying any
form of superficiality, prejudice, and decorativism.
Lina Bo [Bardi], “Architecture and Nature: The House within the Landscape,” 1943
In the first pages of In Search of a Living Architecture,
Frey describes form as the “physical realization of an
inner concept . . . dependent on an intention and the
presence of a purpose.”22 The form endures so long as
its purpose continues, but often, the continuation of
obsolete forms based on human habit and familiarity
retards the establishment of expressive contemporary
design. Frey’s purpose, in articulating the evolution
of form, is to “speed up the process of assimilation
and make possible the simultaneous creation of
modern means and respective forms.”23 Style, he
explains, is a flawed attempt to compensate for the
lack of understanding of new shapes and results in
“a faddish pattern superimposed on new objects
indiscriminately.”24 He warns that “it is as much a
mistake to transfer aspects of modern technics . . . as
to imitate the crystallized compositions of nature or
old architecture.”25 Instead, he continues, we should
study nature and the forms that endure in traditional
architecture to discover the basic principles of shape,
space and composition that will enable architects to
“build a living architecture that not only provides us
with physical comfort but with spiritual enjoyment as
well.”26 Among Frey’s personal papers are farmhouse
plans he prepared for the Bureau of Agricultural
Engineering and Home Economics, which may have
been templates for the modest, 320-square-foot Frey
 107
8 Lina Bo Bardi, “Casa in collina” (House on the Hill) [Harwell Hamilton Harris,
Hawk House, Silverlake, CA, 1939] and “Casa in La Cañada, California” (House
in La Cañada, California) [Harwell Hamilton Harris, Powers House, La Cañada,
CA, 1939], Domus, no. 191 (November 1943): 468
18 Lina Bo Bardi, Bardi House (Casa de vidro), São Paulo, Brazil,
1949–1952, photograph by Cathrine Veikos, 2009
House I he designed for himself.27
Lina Bo [Bardi]’s 1943 article, “Architecture and
Nature: The house within the landscape,” also begins
with an invective against style, echoing Frey’s more
gently worded warnings: “An architectural approach
focused exclusively on style—a style that can be
described as essentially emphasizing the decorative
superstructure . . . has crystallized architecture into a
series of fixed patterns, creating a form of estheticism
that is not only superficial but also a-functional . . .”
(fig. 7).28 Lina Bo [Bardi] argues instead for an approach
that would “restore the relationship between LAND-
CLIMATE-ENVIRONMENT-LIFE, the approach of the
marvelous primitivism of rural architecture, deeply
connected to the land, with its proportions dictated
by man’s measure.”29 Eleven houses are featured,
with photos collaged with blue skies and plans with
numerical legends indicating the identity of rooms and
other spaces. For each exemplary house, Bo [Bardi]
carefully notes the site strategies, including how the
orientation of the house provides scenic views or
takes advantage of multiple levels to create outdoor
promenades, patios, terraces, storage, or garages.
As if to underline their “spontaneous” and
“primordial” character, the buildings go unidentified,
captioned simply with titles like “House in the park”
and “House on the hills of Catalina,” without reference
to the architects but highlighted only as “spontaneous
constructions” by “a local master mason” or “a perfect
example of a freely inspired design.” Three of the
eleven houses featured in the article can be identified
as the work of the California architect Harwell Hamilton
Harris: The “House on the mountain” (built for Miss
Greta Granstedt (1938)); “The House on the hill”
(also known as the Edwin Hawk House (1939)); and
“House in La Cañada, California” (also known as the
Powers House (1939)).
The ideal relationship of the building to the
landscape is made clear in the building descriptions,
for example, for “House on the Hill” (fig. 8). Bo
[Bardi] wrote that it: “is especially interesting for the
way it is laid out on the terrain, while the winding
wall surrounding the garden helps to create a close
bond between the building and the land.”30 Identical
photographs of the Granstedt House appeared in
the 1942 exhibition of the San Francisco Museum of Art,
Western Living.31 The exhibition also included houses
by John Ekin Dinwiddie and Albert Henry Hill, Richard
Neutra, William Wilson Wurster, and Hervey Parke
Clark. The Museum of Modern Art renamed the show
Five California Houses and presented it from March
17 to April 18, 1943. In it, Neutra is quoted as saying,
“Straightforward use of materials and orderly simplicity
of layout with friendly openness toward the outdoors
have been the consistent aim of this architect for many
years.”32 This clear concept regarding the relationship
among materials, architecture, and the environment
was a touchstone for both Frey and Bo Bardi as well,
especially apparent in the houses they designed for
themselves.
A July 1948 publication on Frey House I quotes
Frey: “I am thrilled every day by the varying spectacle
of the natural views that are part of it, changing with
light and color, wind, rain, stillness and sunshine . . . .”33
Nature is brought inside, enhanced by the corrugated-
metal ceiling plane that is painted sky blue. Conversely,
the floor-to-ceiling sliding-glass doors extend out into
the desert landscape, framing parts of it as exterior
rooms. In later additions to the house, he continued his
experiments with industrial materials from Aluminaire
and the Kocher Canvas Weekend House, including
lightweight corrugated aluminum and sheet metal
as well as designs for suspended stairs, and formed
concrete and glass furniture. In a 1991 video about his
houses, Frey narrates the features of House I and House
II calling out his attention to materials and colors that
“blend with the surrounding nature” and to the animals
that live in and around it.34 After searching for five years,
Frey explains, he “got lucky” and acquired a magnificent
acre of land among the rocks with a steep site on
Palisades Drive. The lot history and drawings of Frey
House II reveal that he altered the lot line between lots
8 and 9 by fifty feet to include the boulder that defines
the house’s character. He set the house into the hill,
raising it on retaining walls to create a car park below
it. He describes the materials, concrete dyed to match
the color of the native boulders, and the contrasting
industrial products, including the four-inch-square tube
posts, the color-coded aluminum and sliding glass
doors, the “dusty terracotta” for the floor slabs, and the
“driftwood finish of the Philippine mahogany interior
plywood walls and built-in cabinets.”
Bo [Bardi]’s Italian mentors, Gio Ponti and Bruno
Zevi, continued to correspond with her after her
departure from Italy and promoted her early work in
their magazines.35 Gio Ponti published Richard Neutra’s
Kaufmann House and his lecture from Venice (1948),
along with Bo Bardi’s MASP interiors, furniture designs,
and the Casa de vidro (1952), the first ground-up
architectural commission of her career (a residence for
herself and her husband). Bruno Zevi’s promotion of his
concept of “organic architecture” highlighted Wright,
Neutra, and Rudolph Schindler, but also, Harwell
Hamilton Harris, whose homes Bo [Bardi] had featured
as exemplary for the restoration of the relationship
between LAND-CLIMATE-ENVIRONMENT-LIFE.36
 109 Bo Bardi felt that the house should be connected
to, or even blend into, the surrounding natural
environment. She described Casa de vidro, as “seeking
to be a communion between nature and the natural
order of things, opposing elements of nature with the
least means of protection.”37 Bo Bardi situated the
Casa de vidro near the top of a hilly, seven-thousand-
square-meter property. The bulk of the house is set into
the hill, and the glazed box at the front, pierced with an
atrium to preserve the existing tree, hovers on pilotis
(stilts) above the landscape. The ground rises up around
both sides of the house, terraced by stone-encrusted
steps. Bo Bardi used traditional materials for these
landscape elements and two later additions: a low-lying,
straw-covered garage and a small cabin-like office. The
curvilinear driveway is highlighted by tiny multicolored
stones and mosaic tiles (fig. 9). Everywhere, tiny stones
and patterns, figures of flower petals, and meanders
accentuate the profile of the hill, conjuring the presence
of the workers who placed each stone in the dirt.
Approaching the house this way, the visitor does
not enter so much as climb up into it via the suspended
steel-and-granite stairs. Like the Kocher Canvas Weekend
10 Throne chairs in Bardi House (Casa de vidro), photograph by Peter Scheier, 1951 House, suspended stairs, the thin columns, natural
colors, and materials of the Casa de vidro amplify the
sense of lightness. At seventeen centimeters (six and
a half inches) in diameter, the columns seem more like
tension cables preventing the voluminous structure from
floating away rather than compressive members holding
it up and away from the sloping terrain. On the interior,
the effect is similar (fig. 10). Only the perimeter columns
are allowed to penetrate the slab. This condition, coupled
with the slight downward pitch of the ceiling plane,
reinforces an idea of the ceiling as a tent or tarp, being
secured to the earth by vertical members in tension. An
early photo shows that Bo Bardi’s design solution for the
resulting unevenness of the curtain length is the same as
Frey’s accommodation of the curtain around the boulder
in his Frey House II.
Beginning in 1953, the house appeared in
architectural periodicals and was presented alongside
the work of Brazilian modernists such as Oscar
Niemeyer, Lúcio Costa, Gregori Warchavchik, João
Vilanova Artigas, and Rino Levi, in the seminal book,
Modern Architecture in Brazil (1956).38 The building,
conceived between 1950 and 1951 and completed in
1952, is roughly contemporaneous with Philip Johnson’s
Glass House (1949), the Eames house (1945–49), and
Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House (1951), and has
often been compared to them (see Bardi House portfolio,
pp. 85–99).39 Bo Bardi’s employment of pilotis and the
way she engages an existing tree within the house and
allows it to pop up past the roof line has led to easy
associations with Le Corbusier as well.40 Recent Brazilian
scholarship has argued for the consistency of Bo Bardi’s
design with buildings and practices already existing
in Brazil at the time, for example, Oscar Niemeyer’s
own house at Canoas (1953), although with its captured
boulder, Frey House II (1964) is the closer analogue,
notwithstanding the precedent at Fallingwater (1936–39)
or the lesser-known house with a glass wall framing an
existing boulder, Snake Hill Road by Carl Koch (1940),
which Bo [Bardi] published in her 1944 article for Domus,
entitled, “Interior Accommodations.”41
Though they were both considered modernists and
harnessed the most contemporary technological means
in their designs, Bo Bardi and Frey but were suspicious
of technical novelty for its own sake. Bo Bardi extolled
her students: “When technique’s only virtue is its look…
it becomes mere decoration. Newness for the sake of
newness, strangeness for the sake of strangeness, may
attract the eye but not the intelligence or the heart.”42
Likewise, Frey was quoted as saying that “modern
architecture is much more than mere whim or fancy. Nor
is mere change, or newness, to be desired for its own
sake. Much of what is old is still good, and a house must
still meet a man’s ancient needs for shelter, security,
privacy, comfort.”43 The purpose of architecture was also
of the utmost importance to Bo Bardi. In Propaedeutic
Contribution to the Teaching of Architectural Theory (fig.
11), she wrote “the architect [must be] fully conscious
of his own responsibility as a ‘producer’ of a real
work, which lasts and is visible to everyone; work that
will endure in the spiritual inheritance which every
generation passes on to the next.”44 Bo Bardi and Frey
created bold and enduring buildings by juxtaposing
natural materials with raw, industrially mass-produced
ones. This inflection of traditional techniques and
materials of construction with modern ones belies the
understanding that we have a spiritual and emotional
attachment to certain formal compositions and materials
found in traditional architecture that possess qualities of
abstract beauty.
1 Letter from Le Corbusier, in Joseph Rosa, Albert Frey, Architect (New York: Rizzoli
International Publications, 1999), 39.
2 Letter from Le Corbusier, Frey Archive, University of California, Santa Barbara.
Box 1, Folder 12.
3 Giovanni Giovannoni, Vecchie città ed edilizia nuova (Torino: Unione Tipografico-
Editrice Torinese, 1931).
4 Lina Bo Bardi, Contribuição Propedeutica au ensino da teoria da Arquitetura (São
Paulo: Habitat, Ltd., 1957), 52. Translated by Cathrine Veikos in Lina Bo Bardi: The
Theory of Architectural Practice (London: Routledge, Taylor & Francis, 2013), 142.
This essay uses Bo [Bardi] when referencing Lina prior to her marriage.
5 P. M. Bardi, a prominent journalist and critic, was among the first to critique
Piacentini in his infamous polemical cartoon, “Tavola degli orrori” [Table of
horrors], in which Bardi ridiculed the neo-classicism and eclecticism of the official
style of Mussolini’s Rome.
6 Lina Bo Bardi, “Synopsis of the Museum of Art,” Habitat, no. 1 (October-December
1950): 20.
7 Ibid. 27.
8 Bo Bardi worked with collaborators, André Vainer and Marcelo Carvalho Ferraz, on
the Cerrado Church, the Santa Maria dos Anjos Chapel in Vargem Grande Paulista
(São Paulo State, 1978) and the SESC Pompéia.
 111 9 Habitat, Lina Bo Bardi, Director (São Paulo: Habitat Editora Ltda., 1950–54),
afterwards, directed by others until 1961.
10 Lina Bo Bardi, Contribuição Propedeutica, 29, translated by Veikos in Lina Bo Bardi,
108.
11 Lina Bo Bardi, “São Paulo Art Museum” in São Paulo Art Museum, Monograph n.p.
12 Lina Bo Bardi, “Case sui Trampoli” Domus, no. 195 (March 1944): 86–87.
13 L.B.C.P., “Alla ricerca di una architettura vivente” (In Search of a Living Architecture),
Domus, no. 192 (December 1944).
14 Domus, no. 198 (June 1944): 199–208.
15 Domus, no. 195 (March 1944): 86–87.
16 Michelangelo Sabatino makes clear the nuances between these and other terms like
“architettura naturale,” “architettura popolare,” “architettura primitiva,” “architettura
primitiva,” “architettura spontanea” in “Back to the Drawing Board? Re-visiting the
Vernacular Tradition in Italian Modern Architecture,” Annali di architettura: Revista
de Centro internazionale di Studi di Architettura Andrea Palladio di Vicenza, v. 16
(2004):169–185.

17 Borden Painter, Jr., W. Mussolini’s Rome: Rebuilding the Eternal City (New York:
Springer/Palgrave Macmillan, 2005): 128.
18 “Casa per il sabato a Long Island, N.Y.” Costruzioni Casabella 16 (July 1943): 55.
19 Lina Bo [Bardi], “Architettura e natura: la casa nel paessaggio” [“Architecture and
Nature: The house within the landscape”], Domus, no. 191 (Nov. 1943): 464–471.
20 Ibid., 468–469.
21 Domus, no. 213 (September 1946): 1–7. Copies of the issue can be found in the Frey
archive and in the Lina Bo and P. M. Bardi personal collection at the library of the
São Paulo Museum of Art.
22 Albert Frey, In Search of a Living Architecture (New York: Architectural Book
Publishing, Inc., 1939): 7.
23 Ibid., 8.
24 Ibid., 9.
25 Ibid.
26 Ibid.
27 Farmer’s Bulletin 1934, Farm House Plan #6531, 6532 (prepared by Albert Frey & R.G.
Allen, Bureau of Agricultural Engineering & Home Economics, U.S. Department of
Agriculture): 40, 42. Frey Archive, University of California, Santa Barbara.
28 Lina Bo [Bardi]. “Architettura e natura: la casa nel paessaggio” (Architecture and
Nature: The house within the landscape), Domus, no. 191 (Nov. 1943): 464.
29 Ibid.
30 Ibid., 471.
31 The exhibition Western Living: 5 Modern Houses under $7500, ran from April 4–27,
1942, at the San Francisco Museum of Art and later went the Museum of Modern
Art in New York as Five California Houses from March 17 through April 18, 1943. The
magazine California Arts & Architecture, sponsored it. The article reporting on the
exhibition, by Dr. Grace L. McCann Morley, appeared in v. 59 (1942): 23–25.
32 Dr. Grace L. McCann Morley, “Five California Houses,” California Arts and
Architecture, v. 59 (1942): 23–25.
33 Clipping from House and Garden (July 1948): 63. Frey Archive, University of
California, Santa Barbara. Box 1, Folder 67.
34 Script for narration by A. Frey, Houses 1 and 2, 1991. Frey Archive, University of
California, Santa Barbara. Box 1, Folder 28.
35 Gio Ponti, “Casa de vidro” Domus, no. 279 (Feb. 1953): 19–30; “Architetti e Critici
d’Arte Italiani in Brasile : Un Museo Dell ‘ Architetto Lina Bo,” Metron 30 (Dec. 1948):
34–35; “Introduzione al Museo de Arte de San Paolo” Domus, no. 284 (July 1953);
“Museu de Arte di Sao Paolo del Brasile” in L’Architettura, no. 210 (April 1973).
36 Bruno Zevi, Towards an Organic Architecture (London: Faber & Faber, 1950) and
in features and articles in the architectural journals Metron (the journal of the
“Associazione per l’Architettura Organica,” and L’architettura cronache e storia.
37 Lina Bo Bardi, “Residence on the Morumbi” Habitat, no. 10 (January-March 1953): 31.
The description of the house begins by stating the intention to seek a “maximum
approach to nature by means of the simplest way … The point [of the house] was to
have a place to live in, physically sheltered from the atmospheric conditions, that
is, sheltered from rains and winds, but sharing at the same time the poetry and
ethics which can be found even in a storm … to make [the house] part of nature,
11 Lina Bo Bardi, Propeadeutic Contribution to the Teaching of
participating also in the dangers and disregarding the usual protections….”
Architectural Theory (São Paulo, Brazil: Habitat Ltd., 1957): cover
38 Publications of the Glass House include: Casa e Jardim, no.1 (1953): 8; Habitat, São
Paulo, 10 (Jan - March 1953): 31; Ponti, La “Casa de vidro” Domus, no. 279 (Feb
1953): 19- 30; “Built in Brazil: a light glass casa in the air,” Interiors 112, no. 10 (May
1953): 74–83; Architect and Building News no. 17 (April 1953): 488–494; Guiseppina
Pirro, ed. Renee Diamant-Berger, “Habitations,” in Architecture d’Aujourd’hui, v. 24
no. 49 (Oct. 1953); Mindlin, Henrique E., Modern Architecture in Brazil, (London:
Architectural Press, 1956): 182.
39 Carlos Eduardo Comas, “Casino, cobijo, capilla: tres casas de cristal modernas en
Brasil” in Summa+ 2001 Aug.-Sept., no. 50, 70–75; Olivia de Oliviera, “Lina Bo
Bardi: frontières – passages” in Faces, no. 51 (Autumn 2002): 14–21 and Lina Bo
Bardi: Built work, 2G: international architecture review, no. 23–24 (2002): 22–41;
Zeuler Lima, “The Reverse of the Reverse: Another Modernism according to Lina
Bo Bardi” in International Journal of Architecture Theory, On the Interpretation of
Architecture - Applied Interpretation, v. 13, no. 1, May 2009.
40 Olivia de Oliviera, Subtle Substances: The Architecture of Lina Bo Bardi (Barcelona:
Gustavo Gili, 2006).
41 Carlos Eduardo Comas, “Lina 3x2” in ARQtexto 14 (2010).
42 Lina Bo Bardi, “The Theory and Philosophy of Architecture,” manuscript for the first
class at the Visual Arts School of the Federal University of Bahia, August 11, 1958.
Translated by Olivia de Oliviera in Lina Bo Bardi: Built work, 2G: international
architecture review, no. 23–24 (Barcelona: Gustavo Gili, S.A., 2002): 213.
43 Vollie Tripp, “Living Architecture in the Desert Home,” Villager (May 1948) 24. Frey
Archive, University of California, Santa Barbara. Box 1, Folder 73.
44 Lina Bo Bardi, Contribuição Propedeutica, 67, translated by Veikos in Lina Bo Bardi,
172.
113
Lina Bo Bardi
Cirell House, 1957–58
La Torraccia (Guesthouse), 1964
Morumbi, São Paulo, Brazil
 115

Ground-floor plan, frontal elevation, and details, 1958 View from the south, photograph by Peter Scheier, 1958
117

Conceptual plan and perspective drawing, ca. 1957

119

Conceptual elevation with plants, ca. 1957

121

Roof detail, photograph by Nelson Kon, 2002

 123

Internal atrium, photograph by Cathrine Veikos, 2005 East veranda, photograph by Nelson Kon, 2002
 125

Interior of guesthouse [La Torraccia],

North veranda, photograph by Nelson Kon, 2002 photograph by Zeuler R. Lima, 2010
127

Initial plan and elevations of guesthouse [La Torraccia], 1964

129

View from the north, photograph by Nelson Kon, 2002

139
Albert Frey
Frey House II, 1963–64
Bedroom Addition, 1972
Palm Springs, California
 141

Aerial view from the west [before 1972 addition], photograph

View from the north, photograph by Julius Shulman, 1965 by Julius Shulman, 1965
 143

Light and color study of Frey House I,

Solar chart, 1936 stills from 8mm film, ca. 1955
145

Early Sketch for House No. 2 on Level Site, ca. 1955–62

 147

View from southeast corner, Frank Hamerschlag, C. E., Site Survey for Albert Frey
photograph by Julius Shulman, 1965 [showing revised lot lines], 1963
149

Preliminary Site and Floor Plans, Elevations, 1963

 151

South façade with pool and built-in furniture,

Section, 1963 photograph by Julius Shulman, 1965
153

View with morning light,

photograph by Iwan Baan, 2016
 155

View of dining/drafting table, View of dining/drafting table,

photograph by François Halard, ca. 1996 photograph by Julius Shulman, 1965
 157

View from the southwest (before 1972 addition),

AF House No. 2 Bedroom Add’n, ca. 1972 photograph by Julius Shulman, 1965
159

View from the north,

photograph by Iwan Baan, 2016
175
 177 Notes on Contributors
Daniell Cornell is the Donna and Cargill MacMillan
Jr., Director of Art at the Palm Springs Art Museum.
He holds a PhD, Modern Art History and Criticism:
City University of New York Graduate School, a PhD,
American Studies: Washington State University, and
was Fulbright Professor of American Culture at the
University of Porto, Portugal. He has held positions at
several museums, including Yale University Art Gallery,
The Morgan Library, New Museum in New York, and
Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, where he was
Director of Contemporary Art Projects and worked on
exhibitions and commissions, which included Gerhard
Richter, James Turrell, Andy Goldsworthy, Zhan Wang,
Catherine Wagner, Lynn Hershman Leeson, and Shimon
Attie. His exhibition history at Palm Springs includes
Robert Mapplethorpe, Richard Avedon, and Andrea
Zittel. Cornell’s monographic studies include Backyard
Oasis: The Swimming Pool in Southern California
Photography; Asian American Modern: Shifting
Currents; Contours in the Air: The Sculpture of Ruth
Asawa; and Adi Nes: Promise and Possibility.
Zeuler R. Lima, PhD, is associate professor at the School
of Design and Visual Arts at Washington University in
St. Louis and author of the acclaimed biography Lina
Bo Bardi (Yale University Press, 2013). In addition
to teaching the history and theory of architecture
and design and art studios, he is a practicing artist
and designer. Lima has contributed extensively to
national and international book editions, journals,
museum catalogues, editorial and curatorial boards,
and curatorial projects. He was the recipient of the
prestigious 2007 International Bruno Zevi Prize for
architecture history and criticism. His prolific historic
and theoretical research and publishing focus on
modernity and post-WWII architecture and urbanism.
Joseph Rosa is director and CEO of the Frye Art
Museum in Seattle. He was director of the University of
Michigan Museum of Art from 2010 through 2016 and
previously held curatorial department head positions at
the Art Institute of Chicago, the San Francisco Museum
of Modern Art, the Carnegie Museum of Art, and the
National Building Museum. Rosa, a noted scholar on
architect Albert Frey and architectural photographer
Julius Shulman, is the author of seventeen books and
has curated more than fifty exhibitions. His current
research addresses the representation of modern and
contemporary architecture through photography, film,
Preliminary conceptual study for external staircase at MASP,
and the design arts.
São Paulo, Brazil, 1957–68, ca. 1950s
Cathrine Veikos is associate professor of Architecture
and the chair of Interior Design at California College
of the Arts. She is the author of Lina Bo Bardi: The
Theory of Architectural Practice (New York: Routledge,
Taylor & Francis, 2014) with published research
on Bo Bardi’s Museum of Art in São Paulo. As a
scholar, her work on Bo Bardi explores the architect’s
contributions to pedagogy, the value of collaborations
between art and architecture, and a commitment
to a design methodology that is predicated on the
serious observation of the habits and patterns of life.
She received her Master in Architecture degree from
Harvard. As a registered architect she has worked in the
offices of Roland Simounet (Paris), Jean-Paul Viguier
(Paris), and for Bruce Graham at Skidmore, Owings
and Merrill (Chicago) before becoming principal of
atelier4Architecture (a4A), an international firm she
co-founded and led between 1999 and 2004. She is
currently building an interior design practice, Minium, in
the San Francisco Bay area.
Sidney Williams served as curator of architecture
and design at the Palm Springs Art Museum from
2003 to July 2016. She was the founding curator of
the Architecture and Design Center, Edwards Harris
Pavilion, after an historic rehabilitation of a 1961 bank
building which opened in 2014.  Her curatorial projects
include Steel and Shade: The Architecture of Donald
Wexler (2011, with catalogue) co-curated with Dr.
Lauren Bricker and a retrospective of the museum’s
architect, An Eloquent Modernist: E. Stewart Williams,
Architect (2014, with catalogue). Currently, Williams is
an exhibition advisor for the Getty Foundation’s Pacific
Standard Time: LA/LA exhibition, Albert Frey and Lina
Bo Bardi: In Search of a Living Architecture.
Image Credits 179

© Albert Frey Collection, Palm Springs Art

Museum, 55-1999.2: cover, 19, 52 [bottom],
132 [bottom], 181

© Art, Design, & Architecture Museum,

University of California, Santa Barbara
Albert Frey Papers: 2, 20 [top], 22 [top], 24
[left], 66, 100 [top], 130 [both], 132 [middle],
136 [both], 142, 143, 144-45, 147, 148-49, 150,
156; Rudolph Schindler Papers: 50 [top]

© Iwan Baan: 152-53, 158-59, 170 [both]

© Donald Wexler Collection, Environmental

Design Archives-Special Collection,
California State Polytechnic University,
Pomona: 58 [bottom]

Jeff Durkin © Bread Truck Films: 179

© Leonardo Finotti: 74

© François Halard: 154, 164 [bottom],

166 [top]

© Instituto Lina Bo e Pietro Maria Bardi

Francisco Albuquerque: 3, 92-93, 95
Henri Ballot: 12
Lina Bo Bardi: 18, 20 [bottom], 22 [bottom],
24 [right], 82, 88-89, 90, 91, 94, 96, 114, 116-
17, 118-19, 126-27, 176
Peter Scheier: 102 [middle], 108, 115

© Instituto Moreira Salles, São Paulo

Alice Brill: cover, 97
Marcel Gautherot: 72
Peter Scheier: 102 [top]

© J. Paul Getty Trust. Getty Research

Institute, Los Angeles (2004.R.10): 4, 10,
14, 50 [bottom], 54 [both], 56 [both], 100
[bottom], 134 [all], 140, 141, 146, 151, 155,
157, 160, 162 [top]

© Veronika Kellndorfer/Christopher Grimes

Gallery, Santa Monica: 6, 98-99, 166
[bottom], 168 [top two]

© Nelson Kon: 5, 16, 76 [top], 80 [middle], 86-

87, 120-21, 123, 124, 128-29, 162 [bottom], 164
[top three], 168 [bottom left], 172

© Leland Y. Lee Estate: 58 [top]

© Zeuler R. Lima: 76 [bottom], 78, 80 [top,

bottom], 125

Dan McMasters copyright © 1965. Los

Angeles Times. Reprinted with Permission:
48-49

© Fernando Pires: 168 [bottom]

© Michael Schwarting: 52

© Special Collections, John D. Rockefeller

Jr. Library, The Colonial Williamsburg
Foundation: 62, 63, 64, 65, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71,
132 [top]

© Cathrine Veikos: 102 [bottom], 106

[bottom], 122-23

Every reasonable attempt has been

made to identify the owners of copyright.
Errors or omissions will be corrected in Tractor-trailer containing the Aluminaire House disassembled for transporting
subsequent editions. to its new site, Palm Springs, CA, photograph by Jeff Durkin, 2017
List of Lenders

Art, Design, & Architecture Museum

University of California,
Santa Barbara

Aluminaire Foundation

Iwan Baan

California State Polytechnic University,

Pomona

John D. Rockefeller Jr. Library,

The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation

Christopher Grimes Gallery

Brad Dunning

Instituto Lina Bo e Pietro Maria Bardi

Deborah Irmas

Nelson Kon

Zeuler R. Lima

Albert Frey, page from his personal photo journal documenting his interest in
vernacular building types during his travel across the United States, 1932
Checklist Frame: 20 1 ∕16 × 20 1 ∕16 in. (51 × 51 cm)
Courtesy of Special Collections, John
ALBERT FREY D. Rockefeller Jr. Library, The Colonial
Williamsburg Foundation
Iwan Baan,
Dutch, born 1975 Aluminaire House (1931)
Conceptual sketch of kitchen, ca. 1930
Frey House II (Palm Springs, Architects A. Lawrence Kocher
California, 1963–64/72) and Albert Frey
Interior view with morning light, 2016 pencil and pastel on paper
Architect Albert Frey Sheet: 14 ¾ × 10 5 ∕ 8 in. (37.5 × 27 cm)
archival inkjet print Courtesy of Special Collections, John
exhibition rendition D. Rockefeller Jr. Library, The Colonial
Courtesy of Iwan Baan Williamsburg Foundation
Frey House II (Palm Springs, Aluminaire House (1931)
California, 1963–64/72) Elevation and Plan of Mirror, 1930
View from the north at twilight, 2016 Architects A. Lawrence Kocher
Architect Albert Frey and Albert Frey
archival inkjet print pencil on paper
exhibition rendition Frame: 20 1 ∕16 × 20 1 ∕16 in. (51 × 51 cm)
Courtesy of Iwan Baan Courtesy of Special Collections, John
D. Rockefeller Jr. Library, The Colonial
California State Polytechnic Williamsburg Foundation
University, Pomona
Aluminaire House (1931)
Aluminaire House (1931) Inflatable Seating Based on Rubber
Animated CGI renderings and physical Toys & Pads, 1931
models Architects A. Lawrence Kocher
Architects A. Lawrence Kocher and Albert Frey
and Albert Frey graphite on paper
mixed media Sheet: 11 × 8 ½ in. (27.9 × 21.6 cm)
14 ½ × 30 × 30 in. (36.8 × 76.2 × 76.2 cm) Albert Frey Papers, Art, Design, &
California State Polytechnic University, Architecture Museum, UC Santa Barbara
Pomona
Aluminaire House (1931)
Frey House II (Palm Springs, CA, 1963–64/72) Perspective sketch of exterior, ca. 1930
Animated CGI renderings and physical Architects A. Lawrence Kocher
models and Albert Frey
Architect Albert Frey pencil on paper
mixed media Frame: 20 1 ∕16 × 20 1 ∕16 in. (51 × 51 cm)
10 ½ × 30 × 30 in. (26.7 × 76.2 × 76.2 cm) Courtesy of Special Collections, John
California State Polytechnic University, D. Rockefeller Jr. Library, The Colonial
Pomona Williamsburg Foundation
Albert Frey, Aluminaire House (1931)
American, born Switzerland, 1903–1998 Perspective sketch of living room, ca. 1930
Architects A. Lawrence Kocher
Albert Frey: Modern Architect and Albert Frey
Exhibition tour and interview with Albert Frey pencil on paper
and Culver Nichols at Palm Springs Desert Frame: 20 1 ∕16 × 20 1 ∕16 in. (51 × 51 cm)
Museum, January 3, 1993 Courtesy of Special Collections, John
video transfer to digital video disk (DVD) D. Rockefeller Jr. Library, The Colonial
selected clips Williamsburg Foundation
Albert Frey Papers, Art, Design,
& Architecture Museum, UC Santa Barbara Aluminaire House (1931)
Perspective sketch of roof deck, ca. 1930
Aluminaire House (1931) Architects A. Lawrence Kocher
Axonometric drawing showing interior, and Albert Frey
ca. 1930 pencil on paper
Architects A. Lawrence Kocher Sheet: 10 5 ∕ 8 × 13 3 ∕16 in. (27 × 33.5 cm)
and Albert Frey Courtesy of Special Collections, John
pencil on paper D. Rockefeller Jr. Library, The Colonial
Sheet: 20 7 ∕ 8 × 17 13 ∕16 in. (53 × 45.2 cm) Williamsburg Foundation
Courtesy of Special Collections, John
D. Rockefeller Jr. Library, The Colonial Aluminaire House (1931)
Williamsburg Foundation Sketch of roof deck, ca. 1930
Architects A. Lawrence Kocher
Aluminaire House (1931) and Albert Frey
Conceptual sketch of exercise room and pencil and pastel on paper
bathroom, ca. 1930 Sheet: 10 5 ∕ 8 × 14 ¾ in. (27 × 37.5 cm)
Architects A. Lawrence Kocher Courtesy of Special Collections, John
and Albert Frey D. Rockefeller Jr. Library, The Colonial
pencil on paper Williamsburg Foundation
Aluminaire House (1931)
View of front entrance and double-height
living room windows, 1931
Architects A. Lawrence Kocher
and Albert Frey
gelatin silver print
5 × 7 in. (12.7 × 17.78 cm)
Albert Frey Papers, Art, Design,
& Architecture Museum, UC Santa Barbara
Cree House II (Cathedral City, California,
1955–56), ca. 1955
Architects John Porter Clark, Albert Frey,
and Robson Chambers
graphite on paper
22 × 36 1 ∕4 in. (56 × 92 cm)
Albert Frey Papers, Art, Design,
& Architecture Museum, UC Santa Barbara
Frey House I (Palm Springs, California,
1940–41/53)
Section with hanging staircase, ca. 1952
Architect Albert Frey
ink and colored pencil on paper
17 × 26 in. (43 × 66 cm)
Albert Frey Papers, Art, Design,
& Architecture Museum, UC Santa Barbara
Frey House II (Palm Springs, California,
1963–64/72)
AF House No. 2 Bedroom Add’n , ca. 1972
Architect Albert Frey
graphite on paper
10 ¾ × 14 in. (27.3 × 35.6 cm)
Albert Frey Papers, Art, Design,
& Architecture Museum, UC Santa Barbara
Frey House II (Palm Springs, CA, 1963–64/72)
East section, 1963
Architect Albert Frey
graphite and ink on paper
Sheet: 18 × 21 in. (45.7 × 53.3 cm)
Albert Frey Papers, Art, Design,
& Architecture Museum, UC Santa Barbara
Frey House II (Palm Springs, CA, 1963–64/72)
Elevations and details, 1963
Architect Albert Frey
graphite and colored pencil on paper
Sheet: 24 × 36 in. (61 × 91.4 cm)
Albert Frey Papers, Art, Design,
& Architecture Museum, UC Santa Barbara
Frey House II (Palm Springs, CA, 1963–64/72)
Floor plan, 1963
Architect Albert Frey
graphite and ink on paper
Sheet: 18 × 23 ¾ in. (45.7 × 60.3 cm)
Albert Frey Papers, Art, Design,
& Architecture Museum, UC Santa Barbara
Frey House II (Palm Springs, California,
1963–64/72)
Preliminary Site and Floor Plans, Elevations,
1963
Architect Albert Frey
ink on paper
Sheet: 24 × 36 1 ∕4 in. (61 × 92.1 cm)
Albert Frey Papers, Art, Design,
& Architecture Museum, UC Santa Barbara
183 Frey House I (Palm Springs, California,
1941-42/53), light and color study, ca. 1955;
construction of Frey House II (Palm Springs,
California, 1963-64/72), 1963-64
Architect Albert Frey
8mm transfer to digital video disc (DVD)
selected clips
Albert Frey Papers, Art, Design,
& Architecture Museum, UC Santa Barbara
In Search of a Living Architecture
(New York: Architectural Book Publishing
Company, Inc., 1939)
spiral-bound soft cover edition
7 × 10 in. (17.8 × 25.4 cm)
Palm Springs Art Museum purchase
Bent tube chair
repurposed by Albert Frey, ca. 1964
aluminum and rope
31 ½ × 19 × 28 ¾ in. (80 × 48.3 × 73 cm)
© Albert Frey Collection, Palm Springs
Art Museum, 55-1999.2
Multipurpose table
Designer Albert Frey
wood
24 ¾ × 42 1 ∕4 × 30 in. (62.9 × 107.3 × 76.2 cm)
Courtesy of Brad Dunning
Personal photo album, 1934–42
gelatin silver print snapshots mounted
on paper
Sheet: 7 × 10 in. (17.8 × 25.4 cm)
© Albert Frey Collection, Palm Springs
Art Museum, 55-1999.2
Perspective drawing for In Search of
a Living Architecture (1939), n.d.
ink on tracing paper
Sheet: 12 × 13 in. (30.5 × 33 cm)
Albert Frey Papers, Art, Design,
& Architecture Museum, UC Santa Barbara
Perspective drawing for In Search of
a Living Architecture (1939), n.d.
ink on tracing paper
Sheet: 12 × 13 in. (30.5 × 33 cm)
Albert Frey Papers, Art, Design,
& Architecture Museum, UC Santa Barbara
Perspective drawing for In Search of
a Living Architecture (1939), n.d.
ink on tracing paper
Sheet: 12 × 13 in. (30.5 × 33 cm)
Albert Frey Papers, Art, Design,
& Architecture Museum, UC Santa Barbara
Perspective drawing for In Search of
a Living Architecture (1939), n.d.
ink on tracing paper
Sheet: 12 × 13 in. (30.5 × 33 cm)
Albert Frey Papers, Art, Design,
& Architecture Museum, UC Santa Barbara
Perspective drawing for In Search of
a Living Architecture (1939), n.d.
ink on tracing paper
Sheet: 12 × 13 in. (30.5 × 33 cm)
Albert Frey Papers, Art, Design,
& Architecture Museum, UC Santa Barbara
Perspective drawing for In Search of
a Living Architecture (1939), n.d.
ink on tracing paper
Sheet: 12 × 13 in. (30.5 × 33 cm)
Albert Frey Papers, Art, Design,
& Architecture Museum, UC Santa Barbara
Perspective drawing for In Search of
a Living Architecture (1939), n.d.
ink on tracing paper
Sheet: 12 × 13 in. (30.5 × 33 cm)
Albert Frey Papers, Art, Design,
& Architecture Museum, UC Santa Barbara
Perspective drawing for In Search of
a Living Architecture (1939), n.d.
ink on tracing paper
Sheet: 12 × 13 in. (30.5 × 33 cm)
Albert Frey Papers, Art, Design,
& Architecture Museum, UC Santa Barbara
Perspective drawing for In Search of
a Living Architecture (1939), n.d.
ink on tracing paper
Sheet: 12 × 13 in. (30.5 × 33 cm)
Albert Frey Papers, Art, Design,
& Architecture Museum, UC Santa Barbara
Perspective drawing for In Search of
a Living Architecture (1939), n.d.
ink on tracing paper
Sheet: 12 × 13 in. (30.5 × 33 cm)
Albert Frey Papers, Art, Design,
& Architecture Museum, UC Santa Barbara
Service Station for Culver Nichols (Tramway
Gas Station, Palm Springs, California, 1965)
Perspective drawing, 1965
Architects Albert Frey and Robson Chambers
graphite and colored pencil on paper
Sheet: 25 × 36 in. (63.5 × 91.4 cm)
Albert Frey Papers, Art, Design,
& Architecture Museum, UC Santa Barbara
Solar chart, 1936
Architects John Porter Clark and Albert Frey
ink on paper
7 ¾ × 10 in. (19.7 × 25.4 cm)
Albert Frey Papers, Art, Design,
& Architecture Museum, UC Santa Barbara
François Halard,
French, born 1961
Frey House II (Palm Springs, California,
1963–64/72)
View from the southeast, 1995
Architect Albert Frey
archival pigment print from negative,
edition of 7
Frame: 21 1 ∕ 8 × 21 5 ∕ 8 × 2 in.
(53.7 × 54.9 × 5.1 cm)
Gift of L.J. Cella
Frey House II (Palm Springs, California,
1963–64/72)
View from the southwest, 1995
Architect Albert Frey
archival pigment print from negative,
edition of 7
Frame: 21 × 21 1 ∕ 8 × 2 in.
(53.3 × 53.7 × 5.1 cm)
Gift of L.J. Cella
Jackie Leger,
American, born 1947
The House without a Home, n.d.
unpublished documentary on the
Aluminaire House (1931)
selected clips
Courtesy of Jackie Leger
F. S. Lincoln,
American, 1894–1976
Kocher Canvas Weekend House
(Northport, New York, 1934)
Exterior view with Albert on roof deck,
ca. 1935
Architects A. Lawrence Kocher
and Albert Frey
gelatin silver print
Image: 7 7∕8 × 9 ¾ in. (20 × 24.7 cm)
Courtesy of Special Collections,
John D. Rockefeller Jr. Library, The
Colonial Williamsburg Foundation
Frank Hamerschlag, C. E.,
American, 1918–2003
Frey House II (Palm Springs, California,
1963–64/72)
Site Survey for Albert Frey [showing revised
lot lines], 1963
Architect Albert Frey
graphite on paper
24 × 36 in. (61 × 91 cm)
Albert Frey Papers, Art, Design, &
Architecture Museum, UC Santa Barbara
Michael Schwarting,
American, born 1943
Aluminaire House (1931), on location at
Central Islip Campus, New York Institute of
Technology, New York, New York, ca. 1990
archival inkjet print
exhibition rendition
Courtesy of Michael Schwarting
Shell Oil Company
1932 United States Official Road Map
with notations by Albert Frey, 1932
offset lithograph
Sheet: 12 × 18 in. (30.5 × 45.7 cm)
Albert Frey Papers, Art, Design,
& Architecture Museum, UC Santa Barbara
Julius Shulman,
American, 1910–2009
Aerial Tramway Valley Station
(Palm Springs, California, 1964)
View from the east, 1964
Architects John Porter Clark and Albert Frey
black and white digital lightjet print
16 × 20 in. (40.6 × 50.8 cm)
Palm Springs Art Museum purchase
Frey House I
(Palm Springs, California, 1940–41/53)
Albert with his Austin Healey
convertible, 1956
Architect Albert Frey
black and white digital lightjet print
20 × 16 in.
(50.8 × 40.6 cm)
Palm Springs Art Museum purchase
Frey House I (Palm Springs, California,
1940–41/53)
Interior with hanging table, 1953
Architect Albert Frey
color digital lightjet print
14 × 11 in. (35.6 × 28 cm)
Palm Springs Art Museum purchase
Frey House II (Palm Springs, California,
1963–64/72)
Aerial view from the west [before 1972
addition], 1965
Architect Albert Frey
black and white digital lightjet print
11 × 14 in. (28 × 35.6 cm)
Palm Springs Art Museum purchase
Frey House II (Palm Springs, California,
1963–64/72)
View from the north, 1965
Architect Albert Frey
black and white digital lightjet print
16 × 20 in. (40.6 × 51 cm)
Palm Springs Art Museum purchase
Frey House II (Palm Springs, California,
1963–64/72)
View from the southeast corner, 1964
Architect Albert Frey
gelatin silver print mounted on foam board
16 × 20 in. (40.6 × 51 cm)
Palm Springs Art Museum purchase with
funds derived from a previous gift from Mr.
and Mrs. R. H. Hallett
Frey House II (Palm Springs, California,
1963–64/72)
View from the southwest [before 1972
addition], 1965
Architect Albert Frey
black and white digital lightjet print
11 × 14 in. (28 × 35.6)
Palm Springs Art Museum purchase
Frey House II (Palm Springs, California,
1963–64/72)
View of dining/drafting table, 1965
Architect Albert Frey
color photograph
8 × 10 in. (20.3 × 25.4 cm)
© J. Paul Getty Trust. Getty Research
Institute, Los Angeles (2004.R.10)
Palm Springs City Hall (Palm Springs,
California, 1952)
Brise soleil, 1958
Architects Williams, Williams, Williams,
& Clark, Frey, Chambers
black and white digital lightjet print
14 × 11 in. (35.6 × 28 cm)
Palm Springs Art Museum purchase
Stephen H. Willard,
American, 1904–1965
Kocher-Samson Building (Palm Springs,
California, 1934–35)
View from the north, ca. 1935
Architects A. Lawrence Kocher
and Albert Frey
gelatin silver print
3 3∕8 × 6 2∕8 in. (8.6 × 15.9 cm)
© Albert Frey Collection, Palm Springs Art
Museum, 55-1999.2
Kocher-Samson Building (Palm Springs,
California, 1934–35)
View of exterior staircase, ca. 1934
Architects A. Lawrence Kocher
and Albert Frey
gelatin silver print
6 ½ × 4 ½ in. (16.5 × 11.4 cm)
© Albert Frey Collection, Palm Springs Art
Museum, 55-1999.2
Kocher-Samson Building (Palm Springs,
California, 1934–35)
Interior view of upstairs apartment, ca. 1935
Architects A. Lawrence Kocher
and Albert Frey
gelatin silver print
3 1∕4 × 4 7∕8 in. (8.3 × 12.4 cm)
© Albert Frey Collection, Palm Springs Art
Museum, 55-1999.2
Publications
American Institute of Architects Journal
30, no. 6 (December 1958)
periodical
11 × 8 in. (28 × 20 cm)
Palm Springs Art Museum purchase
Domus, no. 213 (September 1946)
periodical
13 × 9 ¾ in. (33 × 24.8 cm)
Palm Springs Art Museum purchase
Palm Springs Life Magazine (January 1967)
periodical
12 × 9 in. (30.5 × 22.9 cm)
Albert Frey Papers, Art, Design,
& Architecture Museum, UC Santa Barbara
Popular Mechanics 56, no. 2 (August 1931)
periodical
9 3∕8 × 6 ½ in. (23.8 × 16.5 cm)
Palm Springs Art Museum purchase
The Architectural Review 81, no. 484
(March 1937)
periodical
14 × 11 in. (35.6 × 27.9 cm)
Palm Springs Art Museum purchase
LINA BO BARDI
Francisco Albuquerque,
Brazilian, 1917–2000
Bardi House (Casa de vidro, São Paulo,
Brazil, 1949–1952)
Lina Bo Bardi at living room windows, 1952
gelatin silver print
Sheet: 6 ¾ × 9 1∕8 in. (17.6 × 23.1 cm)
Courtesy of Instituto Lina Bo
e Pietro Maria Bardi
Bardi House (Casa de vidro, São Paulo,
Brazil, 1949–1952)
Lina Bo Bardi on entrance stairway, 1952
gelatin silver print
Sheet: 7 × 9 1∕8 in. (17.7 × 22.3 cm)
Courtesy of Instituto Lina Bo
e Pietro Maria Bardi
Oswaldo Bratke,
Brazilian, 1907–1997
and Gregori Warchavchik,
Brazilian, born Ukraine, 1896-1972
Jardim Morumby [Green hills gardens]
Subdivision plan (São Paulo, Brazil), ca. 1949
Client Banco Nacional Imobiliário S. A.
ballpoint, graphite, and print on offset paper
Sheet: 13 1∕16 × 25 3∕8 in. (33.2 × 64.4 cm)
Courtesy of Instituto Lina Bo
e Pietro Maria Bardi
Lina Bo Bardi,
Brazilian, born Italy, 1914–1992
Bardi “Cuddle” Bowl Chair, 1951/2011
painted tubular metal and leather
30 × 34 1∕4 in. (76 × 87 cm)
Courtesy of Arper
Bardi “Cuddle” Bowl Chair concept
sketch, 1951
graphite, china ink, and crayon on
offset paper
Sheet: 8 7∕16 × 12 5∕16 in. (21.4 × 31.3 cm)
Courtesy of Instituto Lina Bo
e Pietro Maria Bardi
Bardi “Cuddle” Bowl Chair concept
sketch, 1951
graphite, china ink, and crayon on
offset paper
Sheet: 8 7∕16 × 12 5∕16 in. (21.4 × 31.3 cm)
Courtesy of Instituto Lina Bo
e Pietro Maria Bardi
Bardi “Cuddle” Bowl Chair concept
sketch, 1951
graphite, china ink, and crayon on
offset paper
Sheet: 8 7∕16 × 12 5∕16 in. (21.4 × 31.3 cm)
Courtesy of Instituto Lina Bo
e Pietro Maria Bardi
Bardi House (Casa de vidro, São Paulo,
Brazil, 1949–1952),
Initial perspective study for interior, ca. 1949
china ink on offset paper
Sheet: 4 5∕16 × 4 5∕8 in. (10.9 × 11.8 cm)
Courtesy of Instituto Lina Bo
e Pietro Maria Bardi
Bardi House (Casa de vidro, São Paulo,
Brazil, 1949–1952)
Conceptual study for interior with Lina Bo
and P. M. Bardi in the foreground, ca. 1949
colored pencil and china ink on offset paper
Sheet: 4 5∕16 × 4 5∕8 in. (10.9 × 11.8 cm)
Courtesy of Instituto Lina Bo
e Pietro Maria Bardi
Bardi House (Casa de vidro, São Paulo,
Brazil, 1949-1952),
Initial perspective study for interior, ca. 1949
china ink on offset paper
Sheet: 4 5∕16 × 4 5∕8 in. (10.9 × 11.8 cm)
Courtesy of Instituto Lina Bo
e Pietro Maria Bardi
Bardi House (Casa de vidro, São Paulo,
Brazil, 1949–1952),
Initial perspective study for interior, ca. 1949
china ink on offset paper
185 Sheet: 4 5∕16 × 4 5∕8 in. (10.9 × 11.8 cm)
Courtesy of Instituto Lina Bo
e Pietro Maria Bardi
Bardi House (Casa de vidro, São Paulo,
Brazil, 1949–1952),
Elevation and perspective studies for terraced
gardens, 1951
ballpoint, hydrographic, and graphite on
offset paper
Sheet: 8 9∕16 × 12 5∕16 in. (21.8 × 31.3 cm)
Courtesy of Instituto Lina Bo
e Pietro Maria Bardi
Bardi House (Casa de vidro, São Paulo,
Brazil, 1949–1952)
Preliminary concept sketch, ca. 1940s
graphite on offset paper
6 1∕3 × 9 1∕3 in. (16 × 23.7 cm)
Courtesy of Instituto Lina Bo
e Pietro Maria Bardi
Bola de Latão (Brass ball) “Throne” Chair,
ca. 1987
painted tubular metal, handstitched leather,
and brass
33 1∕16 × 21 7∕16 × 30 11∕16 in. (84 × 54.4 × 78 cm)
Collection of Deborah Irmas
Cirell House (São Paulo, Brazil, 1957–1958)
Conceptual plan and perspective, ca. 1957
watercolor, graphite, colored pencil, and dry
pastel on parchment paper
Sheet: 12 ½ × 19 11∕16 in. (31.7 × 50 cm)
Courtesy of Instituto Lina Bo
e Pietro Maria Bardi
Cirell House (São Paulo, Brazil, 1957–1958)
Preliminary study for circular staircase, ca.
1957
china ink on offset paper
Sheet: 9 5∕8 × 10 13∕16 in. (24.5 × 27.5 cm)
Courtesy of Instituto Lina Bo
e Pietro Maria Bardi
Cirell House (São Paulo, Brazil, 1957–1958)
Ground-floor plan, frontal elevation, and
details, 1958
graphite and china ink on tracing paper
Sheet: 21 5∕8 × 25 3∕16 in. (55 × 64 cm)
Courtesy of Instituto Lina Bo
e Pietro Maria Bardi
Cirell House (São Paulo, Brazil, 1957–1958)
Preliminary plan and elevation, ca. 1957
graphite, colored pencil, and china ink on
parchment paper
Sheet: 19 11∕16 × 22 13∕16 in. (50 × 58 cm)
Courtesy of Instituto Lina Bo
e Pietro Maria Bardi
Conceptual study for a low-cost housing
development with perspective views of an
individual unit, 1951
watercolor, hydrographic, and china ink
on cardstock
Sheet: 27 9∕16 × 39 5∕16 in. (70 × 99.8 cm)
Courtesy of Instituto Lina Bo
e Pietro Maria Bardi
Conceptual study for a low-cost house,
ca. 1950
graphite on parchment paper
Sheet: 9 13∕16 × 13 15∕16 in. (25 × 35.4 cm)
Courtesy of Instituto Lina
Bo e Pietro Maria Bardi
Conceptual study for a low-cost house,
ca. 1950
graphite, colored pencil, and china ink
on tracing paper
Sheet: 15 1∕16 × 20 15∕16 in.
(38.3 × 53.2 cm)
Courtesy of Instituto Lina Bo
e Pietro Maria Bardi
Drawing for Domus, no. 192 (December 1943)
based on illustrations from Albert Frey’s
In Search of a Living Architecture (1939)
Elevation and perspective, ca. 1939–43
gouache, graphite, colored pencil, and
collage on tracing paper
Sheet: 2 3∕8 × 4 ¾ in. (6 × 12.1 cm)
Courtesy of Instituto Lina Bo
e Pietro Maria Bardi
Drawing for Domus, no.192 (December 1943)
based on illustrations from Albert Frey’s
In Search of a Living Architecture (1939)
Perspective solids, ca. 1939–43
gouache, graphite, and colored pencil on
tracing paper
Sheet: 4 7∕16 × 1 15∕16 in. (11.2 × 5 cm)
Courtesy of Instituto Lina Bo
e Pietro Maria Bardi
Drawing for Domus, no. 192 (December 1943)
based on illustrations from Albert Frey’s In
Search of a Living Architecture (1939)
Perspective, ca. 1939–43
gouache, graphite, and colored pencil on
tracing paper
Sheet: 2 5∕8 × 4 15∕16 in. (6.7 × 12.5 cm)
Courtesy of Instituto Lina Bo
e Pietro Maria Bardi
Figueiredo Ferraz House (São Paulo,
Brazil, 1962) [unrealized]
Conceptual perspective study of house on
boulder, ca. 1962
graphite and china ink on parchment paper
Sheet: 7 ½ × 10 in. (19.2 × 25.9 cm)
Courtesy of Instituto Lina Bo
e Pietro Maria Bardi
Figueiredo Ferraz House (São Paulo,
Brazil, 1962) [unrealized]
Section study of house on boulder, ca. 1962
graphite and china ink on parchment paper
Sheet: 7 ½ × 9 13∕16 in. (19 × 25 cm)
Courtesy of Instituto Lina Bo
e Pietro Maria Bardi
Frei Egidio Chair, ca. 1987
wood
32 11∕16 × 16 15∕16 × 19 5∕16 in. (83 × 43 × 49 cm)
Courtesy of Zeuler R. Lima
La Torraccia, Cirell House guesthouse
(São Paulo, Brazil, 1964)
Initial plan and elevations, 1964
watercolor, graphite, and china ink on
parchment paper
Sheet: 24 7∕16 × 35 1∕8 in. (62 × 89.2 cm)
Courtesy of Instituto Lina Bo
e Pietro Maria Bardi
Lina self-portrait, 1933
watercolor and graphite on cardstock
11 × 7 2∕5 in. (28 × 18.9 cm)
Courtesy of Instituto Lina Bo
e Pietro Maria Bardi
Lina at Isola del Giglio (Italy), ca. 1945
gelatin silver print
Image: 6 13∕16 × 4 15∕16 in. (17.3 × 12.5 cm)
Courtesy of Instituto Lina Bo
e Pietro Maria Bardi
MASP (São Paulo, Brazil, 1957–68)
Preliminary study for enclosure system with
prefabricated panels and plants, ca. 1961
graphite, china ink, and collage on
tracing paper
Sheet: 22 3∕8 × 39 1∕4 in. (56.8 × 99.7 cm)
Courtesy of Instituto Lina Bo
e Pietro Maria Bardi
MASP (São Paulo, Brazil, 1957–68)
Preliminary conceptual study for external
staircase, ca. 1950s
Watercolor and graphite on parchment paper
Sheet: 12 ½ × 7 3∕16 in. (31.7 × 18.3 cm)
Courtesy of Courtesy of Instituto Lina Bo
e Pietro Maria Bardi
Personal photo album
Casamento e Viagens [Wedding and
Travels], 1940
gelatin silver prints
Four prints: 2 ¾ × 2 ½ in. (7 × 6.2 cm);
2 ½ × 2 ½ in. (6.4 × 6.2 cm);
2 2∕5 × 2 2∕5 in. (6.1 × 5.7 cm);
2 ½ × 2 2∕5 in. (6.3 × 6.1 cm)
Courtesy of Instituto Lina Bo
e Pietro Maria Bardi
SESC Pompéia (São Paulo, Brazil, 1977–1986)
Preliminary site and landscaping study, 1977
watercolor and graphite on cardstock
Sheet: 11 3∕16 × 15 ½ in. (28.4 × 39.3 cm)
Courtesy of Instituto Lina Bo
e Pietro Maria Bardi
California State Polytechnic
University, Pomona
Bardi House (Casa de vidro, São Paulo,
Brazil, 1949–1952)
Animated CGI renderings and
physical models
Architect Lina Bo Bardi
mixed media
16 ½ × 30 × 30 in. (41.9 × 76.2 × 76.2 cm)
California State Polytechnic
University, Pomona
Cirell House (São Paulo, Brazil, 1957–1958)
Animated CGI renderings and
physical models
Architect Lina Bo Bardi
mixed media
9 × 30 × 30 in. (22.9 × 76.2 × 76.2 cm)
California State Polytechnic
University, Pomona
Veronika Kellndorfer,
German, born 1962
Bardi House (Casa de vidro, São Paulo,
Brazil, 1949–1952)
Tree House (Casa de vidro), 2014
Architect Lina Bo Bardi archival inkjet print (38.2 × 28.1 cm) 187
transparent silkscreen print on glass, exhibition rendition Courtesy of Instituto Lina Bo
edition of 5 Courtesy of Nelson Kon e Pietro Maria Bardi
59 1∕16 × 92 15∕16 in. (150 × 236 cm)
Collection of Deborah Irmas SESC Pompéia (São Paulo, Brazil, 1977–1986) Domus, no. 192 (December 1943)
View of skywalks, 2002 Periodical
Bardi House (Casa de vidro, São Paulo, archival inkjet print 13 × 9 ¾ in. (30 × 24.7 cm)
Brazil, 1949–1952) exhibition rendition Courtesy of Instituto Lina Bo
Quadrado [Casa de vidro], 2015 Courtesy of Nelson Kon e Pietro Maria Bardi
silkscreen print on dichroic glass, edition of 5
Overall: 11 13∕16 × 11 13∕16 × 13 9∕16 in. Zeuler Lima, Domus, no. 195 (March 1944)
(30 × 30 × 34.5 cm) Brazilian, born 1964 Periodical
Courtesy of the artist and Christopher Grimes 13 × 9 ¾ in. (30 × 24.7 cm)
Gallery, Santa Monica Bardi House (Casa de vidro, São Paulo, Brazil, Palm Springs Art Museum purchase
1949–1952)
SESC Pompéia (São Paulo, Brazil, 1977–1986) Exterior view of rear façade, 2010 Domus, no. 213 (September 1946)
Cylindropuntia Fulgida, 2016 archival inkjet print Periodical
transparent silkscreen on glass, edition of 5 exhibition rendition 13 × 9 ¾ in. (30 × 24.7 cm)
Overall: 27 9∕16 × 41 5∕16 in. (70 × 105 cm) Courtesy of Zeuler R. Lima Palm Springs Art Museum purchase
Courtesy of the artist and Christopher Grimes
Gallery, Santa Monica La Torraccia (Cirell House guesthouse, São Habitat, no. 1 (October–December 1950)
Paulo, Brazil, 1964) periodical
Nelson Kon, Exterior view of front façade, 2010 Object: 12 5∕8 × 9 1∕4 (32 × 23.5 cm)
Brazilian, born 1961 archival inkjet print Courtesy of Instituto Lina Bo
exhibition rendition e Pietro Maria Bardi
Bardi House (Casa de vidro, São Paulo, Courtesy of Zeuler R. Lima
Brazil, 1949–1952) Habitat, no. 8 (July–September 1952)
Interior view across living room, 2002 La Torraccia (Cirell House guesthouse, São periodical
Architect Lina Bo Bardi Paulo, Brazil, 1964) Object: 12 5∕8 × 9 1∕4 in. (32 × 23.5 cm)
archival inkjet print Interior view, 2010 Courtesy of Zeuler R. Lima
exhibition rendition archival inkjet print
Courtesy of Nelson Kon exhibition rendition Habitat, no. 10 (January–March 1953)
Courtesy of Zeuler R. Lima periodical
Bardi House (Casa de vidro, São Paulo, Object: 12 5∕8 × 9 1∕4 in. (32 × 23.5 cm)
Brazil, 1949–1952) Peter Scheier, Courtesy of Instituto Lina Bo
View of folk objects, 2002 Brazilian, born Germany, 1908–1979 e Pietro Maria Bardi
Architect Lina Bo Bardi
archival inkjet print Cirell House (São Paulo, Brazil 1957-1958) Interiors 112, no. 10 (May 1953)
exhibition rendition View from the south, 1958 periodical
Courtesy of Nelson Kon gelatin silver print 11 ¾ × 8 ¾ in. (29.8 × 22.2 cm)
7.8 × 8.8 in. (19.7 × 22.3 cm) Palm Springs Art Museum purchase
Bardi House (Casa de vidro, São Paulo, Courtesy of Courtesy of Instituto Lina Bo e
Brazil, 1949–1952) Pietro Maria Bardi Interiors 113, no. 4 (November 1953)
View from the northeast, 2002 periodical
archival inkjet print Bob Wolfenson, 11 ¾ × 8 ¾ in. (29.8 × 22.2 cm)
exhibition rendition Brazilian, born 1954 Palm Springs Art Museum purchase
Courtesy of Nelson Kon
Lina Bo and Pietro Maria Bardi arriving in São Lo Stile, no. 4 (April 1941)
Cirell House (São Paulo, Brazil, 1957–­1958) Paulo, Brazil, 1947 periodical
East veranda, 2002 gelatin silver print 12 ¾ × 9 ¾ in. (32.4 × 24.8 cm)
archival inkjet print 10 9∕16 × 7 1∕16 in. (26.9 × 17.8 cm) Palm Springs Art Museum purchase
exhibition rendition Courtesy of Instituto Lina Bo
Courtesy of Nelson Kon e Pietro Maria Bardi Lo Stile, no. 11 (November 1951)
periodical
Cirell House (São Paulo, Brazil, 1957–1958) Lina Bo Bardi holding her favorite lamp, 1978 12 ¾ × 9 ¾ in. (32.4 × 24.8 cm)
Roof detail, 2002 gelatin silver print Courtesy of Zeuler R. Lima
archival inkjet print Image: 9 1∕4 × 6 15∕16 in. (23.5 × 17.7 cm)
exhibition rendition Courtesy of Instituto Lina Bo Lo Stile, no. 24 (December 1942)
Courtesy of Nelson Kon e Pietro Maria Bardi periodical
12 ¾ × 9 ¾ in. (32.4 × 24.8 cm)
MASP (São Paulo, Brazil, 1957–68) Publications Palm Springs Art Museum purchase
View from Paulista Avenue, 2001
archival inkjet print A – Cultura della Vita Magazine 9 Revista Rio 2, no. 92 (February 1947)
exhibition rendition (June 1946) periodical
Courtesy of Nelson Kon periodical Object: 12 ¾ × 10 ¾ in. (32.4 × 27 cm)
Object: 15 1∕16 × 11 1∕16 in. Courtesy of Instituto Lina Bo
MASP (São Paulo, Brazil, 1957–68), 2001 (38.2 × 28.1 cm) e Pietro Maria Bardi
View of Trianon Terrace from staircase, 2001 Courtesy of Instituto Lina Bo
archival inkjet print e Pietro Maria Bardi
exhibition rendition
Courtesy of Nelson Kon A – Cultura della Vita Magazine 2
(March 1946)
SESC Pompéia (São Paulo, Brazil, 1977–1986) periodical
Lina Bo Bardi, study for the belvedere with various sculptures
View of lounge and reflecting pool, 2002 Object: 15 1∕16 × 11 1∕16 in. and children’s playground, 1968
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Index
Page references to illustrations are in italics;
page references denoting comparative
illustrations are in bold and italic.
Allied Arts and Building Productions
Exhibition, 131
Aluminaire House (Syosset, Long Island),
2, 3, 61–71; design and construction,
23, 131; innovative materials, use of,
107; International Style, example of, 51;
preservation battle, 133; relocations, 17,
21, 52, 131, 133, 137, 179. See also Kocher,
A. Lawrence; Frey, Albert
arquitetura pobre, 81, 103. See also Bo
Bardi, Lina
Artigas, João Vilanova: Artigas House (São
Paulo), 74; design education reform, 81;
First Congress of Brazilian Architects, 75
Arts & Architecture (magazine): See also
Case Study House program; Entenza,
John
Baan, Iwan, 25, 161; photographs by, 152–53,
158–59, 169, 170, 171
Bardi, Pietro Maria (P. M.), 21, 96; arrival in
São Paulo, 18, 73; career and marriage,
73, 77, 103; fascism, 103, 109n5; Museu
de Arte São Paulo (MASP), 73, 103. See
also Bo Bardi, Lina
Bardi House (São Paulo), 3, 46–47, 78, 79,
80, 85–99, 102, 103, 108; architecture
and nature, 79, 107; Case Study
Houses, comparison to, 79; design
and construction, 21, 79, 107, 109;
glass houses, comparisons to, 109;
international attention, 109; Nelson Kon,
photographs by 5, 16, 63, 86–87, 162, 164,
165; role of Oswaldo Bratke, 23, 79; use
of traditional materials, 107; Veronika
Kellndorfer, photographs by, 166, 167,
169. See also Jardim Morumbi
Bo Bardi, Lina (Lina Bo): Albert Frey’s
influence on, 81; arquitetura pobre, 81;
education, 101; experience as female
architect, 103; Gio Ponti, mentorship,
101; influences, 79, 81, 101, 103, 105,
107; marriage, 73, 103; projects in Bahia,
81, 103; tenure thesis, 79, 103, 109,
110; translation of In Search of a Living
Architecture: 11, 20, 21, 22, 24, 33, 73, 79,
101, 103, 105, 135; World War II, effect on,
101, 103, 105; writing, 34, 35, 40, 41, 45,
105, 135. See also Bardi, Pietro Maria (P.
M.) and individual building names
Bratke, Oswaldo: Americano House (São
Paulo), 76, 79; California architecture,
interest in, 23, 77; career and education,
75, 77; Paulistano, 73; Richard Neutra,
contact with, 23, 77; urbanization
projects, 77. See also Jardim Morumbi
Brazilian modernist architecture. See
Carioca architecture; Paulistano
architecture
brutalism, 11, 165, 169; E. Stewart Williams,
11
Carioca architecture, 73, 75, 81, 165;
Corbusierian ideology, adherence to, 75.
See also Costa, Lúcio
Casabella (periodical), 103, 105
Casa de vidro. See Bardi House (São Paulo)
Case Study House program, 55, 57, 161:
affordability, 57; glass and steel, use of,
57; Julius Shulman, photographs by, 56,
160, 161, 171n5; Paulistano architects,
influenced by, 79; postwar house
designs, 57
Case Study House #8 (Eames House) [Los
Angeles], 56, 57; Bardi House compared
to, 109
Case Study House #22 (Stahl House) [Los
Angeles], 56, 57
Chambers, Robson, 134, 135, 137
Cirell House, 23, 80, 113–29: design and
construction, 21, 79; departure from
Bardi House, 79; influences, 79; Nelson
Kon, photographs by, 80, 120–21, 123,
124, 128–29. See also La Torraccia
Clark, John Porter, 53; Albert Frey,
collaboration with, 53, 55, 57, 133, 135;
innovation in materials, 55, 135; Loewy
House (Palm Springs), 134, 135; Palm
Springs Aerial Tramway Valley Station,
134, 135; Van Pelt and Lind, 133
Costa, Lúcio, 73, 75, 109, 165
Domus (magazine): Albert Frey, articles on,
21, 23, 34–35, 38–39, 55, 73, 79, 105, 135;
Lina Bo Bardi, articles by, 21, 23, 34–35,
38–39, 40, 101, 104, 105, 106, 109; Lina
Bo Bardi, editorship, 21, 109. See also In
Search of a Living Architecture (Frey)
Eames House (Los Angeles), 56, 57. See also
Case Study House program; Case Study
House #8 (Eames House) [Los Angeles]
Elrod House (Palm Springs), 57, 58
émigrés: contributions to Southern
California architecture, 51; contributions
to Brazilian architecture, 51, 75, 77
Entenza, John, 55, 77
Escola Carioca, 165. See also Carioca
architecture
Espirito Santo Do Cerrado. See Bo Bardi,
Lina
First Congress of Brazilian Architects, 75
Five California Houses (exhibition),
107, 11n31. See also Western Living
(exhibition)
Frey, Albert: A. Lawrence Kocher,
partnership, 51; arrival in United
States 11, 16; design for MOMA, 53,
133; education, 101, 131; fascination
with experimental materials, 17, 101;
influences, 131, 133; John Porter Clark,
partnership, 53, 133, 135; later style, 57;
Le Corbusier, mentorship, 17, 23, 101, 131,
135; methodology, 101; road trips, 51,
131, 133; Robson Chambers, partnership,
134, 135; See also names of individual
buildings
Frey House I (Palm Springs): design and
construction, 53, 55, 135; Julius Shulman,
photographs by, 4, 10, 54, 100, 134, 162,
163; nature, relationship to, 107; publicity
of, 55
Frey House II (Palm Springs), 136, 138–59;
boulder, 59, 107; design and construction,
57, 101; Eames House, influence of, 57;
François Halard, photographs by, 154,
165, 166, 167; Iwan Baan, photographs
by, 152–53, 158–59, 169, 170, 171; Julius
Shulman, photographs by, 140, 141, 146,
151, 155, 157; materials, experiments
with, 57, 137; nature, relationship
with, 57; Palm Springs Art Museum,
stewardship of, 11, 21, 22, 137; site,
difficulty of, 11, 107, 137; Veronika
Kellndorfer, photographs by, 168, 169
functionalism, 51, 53, 57
Giovannoni, Gustavo: Vecchie città ed
edilizia nuova, 101
glass-and-steel-framed houses:
affordability, 57; early experiments, 57;
examples of, 57, 107, 109, 131, 135
Glass House (Morumbi, São Paulo). See
Bardi House
Grossman, Greta Magnusson, 54, 55
Habitat (magazine), 43, 73, 77, 81, 103
Halard, François, 25, 161; photographs of
Frey House II, 154, 164, 165, 166, 167
Hitchcock, Henry-Russell, 51, 133
In Search of a Living Architecture (Frey), 11,
23, 28–31, 101, 104, 133; Frey House II,
relation to, 57, 59; translation by Lina Bo
Bardi, 11, 20, 21, 22, 24, 33, 73, 79, 101,
103, 105, 135
Instituto de Architetos de Brazil (IAB), 12, 75.
See also Paulistano architecture
Interiors (magazine), 44, 45
International Style, 51, 133: exhibition and
book, 51
Jardim Morumbi: Bardi property, 79;
concept and development, 77. See also
Bardi House; Bratke, Oswaldo; Cirell
House; La Torrancia
Johnson, Philip: curator, 51, 133; The
International Style, 51; Glass House (New
Canaan, CT), 57, 109
Kaufmann House (Palm Springs), 57, 105,
107
Kellndorfer, Veronika, 25, 161; Bardi House,
installation, 98–99; photographs by, 166,
167, 168, 169; technique, 167; “Tropical
Modernism,” 167, 169
Kocher, A. Lawrence: Albert Frey,
partnership with, 21, 23, 51, 53, 105, 131,
133. See also individual building names
Kocher Canvas Weekend House (Northport,
NY), 23, 100; Bardi House, similarities
to, 109; experiments with materials,
107, 133; Le Corbusier, influence of, 101,
137n6; Lina Bo Bardi, article on, 103, 105,
134–35; pilotis, use of, 132, 133
Kocher-Samson Building (Palm Springs), 52,
132; Frey House II, comparison to, 137;
International Style, example of, 133
Koenig, Pierre, 161: Case Study House #21
(Stahl House), 56, 57, 171n5; Case Study
House #22, 57
Kon, Nelson, 161: Brazilian architecture,
photographs of, 25, 169, 171;
photography by, 5, 16, 76, 86–87, 120–121,
123–24, 128–29, 162, 163, 164, 165, 168
Lautner, John, 55, 58, 161
Le Corbusier: Albert Frey, mentor to, 23, 51,
101; Carioca architecture, influence on,
23, 75; Lina Bo Bardi, influence on, 103;
Towards an Architecture, 131
Levi, Rino, 109: émigré status, 73; First
Congress of Brazilian Architects, 75;
Gomes House (São José dos Campos), 72;
Paulistano architecture, pioneer, 73, 77
191 living architecture, 17: Albert Frey’s concept
of, 105, 107, 135; Lina Bo Bardi’s concept
of, 21, 107
Loewy House (Palm Springs), 134: design
and site, 135
Lo Stile (magazine), 36–37, 41, 42, 101
Lovell Beach House (Newport Beach), 50;
poured-in-place concrete, use of, 51
Lovell Health House (Los Angeles), 50,
133; International Style, example of, 51;
prefabricated steel, use of, 51
Marx, Roberto Burle, 72, 103, 165
materials in modern architecture, 101,
107; asbestos cement, 135; concrete
51, 75; corrugated metal 53, 107, 131;
glass and steel, 51, 57, 107, 109, 131, 135;
prefabricated, 131, 133
Modern Architecture in Brazil (Mindlin), 109
Modern Architecture in California (exhibit),
133
The Modern House (Ford and Morrow Ford),
55, 133
Modernism Week, Palm Springs, 133
Morumbi. See Jardim Morumbi
Museu de Arte Moderna (MAM):
development of, 77; Rockefeller’s
association with, 75, 77
Museu de Arte de Saõ Paulo (MASP), 103,
164, 176, 187: Bardi’s development of, 75,
103; Brasilia, comparison to, 165; Lina
Bo Bardi, architect of, 103; Robert Burle
Marx’s landscape design, 165
Museum of Modern Art, New York, 51;
design of, 53, 103; Five California Houses,
101; Modern Architecture in California,
133; postwar exhibition of Brazilian art,
77; Rockefeller’s association with, 75
Neutra, Richard, 105; Architecture of Social
Concern in Regions of Mild Climate, 77;
Brazil, visits to, 23, 77, 103; concerns
about social and environmental
aspects of architecture, 77; émigré
status, 51; Lovell Health House, 50, 51;
Kaufmann House, 57, 105, 107; materials,
experiments with, 131; Paulistano
architecture, influence on, 77; Rockefeller,
funding, 23, 77; Wie Baut Amerika?, 131
Niemeyer, Oscar: Brasilia, 165; Lúcio
Costa, mentorship, 73; United Nation
Headquarters, 77; utopian ambitions, 165
Pagani, Carlo, 101; publications with Lina Bo
Bardi, 32, 33, 34, 35, 41, 103
Palm Springs (City of): air-conditioning,
influence on; 57; climate, 53; postwar
boom, 55; prevalence of functionalist
architecture, 55, 57; use as WWII U.S.
Army post, 55
Palm Springs Aerial Tramway, Valley
Station, 101, 134, 135, 137
Palm Springs Art Museum: Aluminaire
House, stewardship of, 11
Palm Springs City Hall, 160: brise-soleil, 135,
163; construction of, 101, 135;
Paubrá, 75, 77
Paulistano architecture, 73, 83n4: California,
influence on, 77, 84; commercial nature,
73; coup d’état, effect of, 81; Instituto
de Arquitetos do Brazil, 75; state
sponsorship, lack of, 73; Artigas, central
figure, 81; Universidade Mackenzie, 81
photography and architecture: poetics of,
23, 25, 161 Bardi, influence on, 81, 105; “The Value of
Piacentini, Marcello, 101, 109n5 Traditional Architecture” (Frey), 105
pilotis, use in: Aluminaire House, 131; Bardi Villa Savoye, 105, 131, 137, 165
House, 79, 109; Kocher Canvas Weekend
House, 133 Warchavchik, Gregori, 73: Casa Modernista
postwar Brazil, 21, 73, 75: boom, 23; as (São Paulo), 72; work on Jardim Morumbi,
cultural laboratory, 23; U.S. State 77
Department mission to study housing Western Living (exhibition), 107, 11n31. See
alternatives, 79 also Five California Houses
postwar Italy: role of architecture in Williams, E. Stewart: Palm Springs Art
reconstruction, 79, 101, 103 Museum, 11, 57, Palm Springs City Hall,
prefabricated housing: introduction to U.S. 135
from Europe, 51; postwar architecture, World War II, 21: effect on Lina Bo Bardi, 101
use in, 51 Wright, Frank Lloyd, 55: Brazilian
architecture, influence on, 75, 77; Lina Bo
rationalism: Carioca architecture, Bardi, influence on, 79, 103; meeting with
connection to, 75; Cirrell House, 79 Albert Frey, 131, 133
Rio de Janeiro, 73
Rockefeller, Nelson A.: cultural initiatives, Zevi, Bruno, 79: debate with Lina Bo Bardi,
23, 75; Richard Neutra, patronage of, 23 79, 103; organic architecture, 107
Rogers, Ernesto N., 21, 103
Ruchti, Jacob: Branco e Preto, 77; émigré
status, 75; friendship with the Bardis, 75
São Paulo: contribution of émigrés, 75; coup
d’état, 81; Los Angeles, connection to,
77, 84; postwar development, 73, 75; U.S.
investment in, 75. See also Paulistano
architecture
Schindler, Rudolph, 21, 105; émigré status,
51; Lovell Beach House, 50, 51; Popenoe
Cabin, 53
Second World War, 21: effect on Lina Bo
Bardi, 101
SESC Pompéia (São Paulo), 102, 103, 171,
172; Nelson Kon, photographs by, 168;
popularity among photographers, 169;
Veronica Kellndorfer, photographs by,
168, 169
Shore House, 57
Shulman, Julius, 25, 161, 163; pioneer
of architectural photography, 161;
photographs by, 4, 10, 50, 54, 56, 56, 134,
140–41, 146, 151, 155, 157
Southern California: as cultural laboratory,
21; export of culture, 57; influence of
climate and geography on architecture,
51, 55
Stahl House (Los Angeles), 56, 57. See also
Case Study House program; Case Study
House #22 (Stahl House) [Los Angeles]
standardization of building industry in the
United States, 51
Taliesin (Spring Green, WI), 55, 133
This Modern House in America (Ford and
Morrow Ford), 133
La Torraccia (Morumbi, São Paulo),
80, 125, 126–27: Brazilian vernacular
architecture, influence on, 78, 79; design
and construction, 81; Frank Lloyd Wright,
influence on, 81
Tramway Gas Station (Palm Springs), 132,
136, 137
Universidade Presbiteriana Mackenzie:
Paulistano architecture, role in, 75, 77;
Richard Neutra, visit with students, 77
Vargas, Getúlio, 23, 73: end of regime, 75;
Estado Novo, 73, Lúcio Costa, support
of, 73
vernacular architecture: Albert Frey’s
photographs of, 131, 133, 181; Lina Bo