Sabine von Fischer

The Horizons of Lina Bo Bardi:

The Museu de Arte de São Paulo
in the Context of European
Postwar Concepts of Architecture

When the Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP) was inaugerated in 1968, it could be seen
from far and wide. Today, obscured by the many high-rises that have been built up
over the past fifty years, one does not find it so easily when looking for it—despite a
red protective coating added in 1991 to the museum’s already spectacular pre-stressed
concrete support structure, suspending the seventy-four-meter-long, fully glazed body
off the ground.

Freedom, posited between architecture and politics

“This is the architecture of freedom,” John Cage proclaimed, as the story goes, when
walking along the square on Avenida Paulista under the museum’s building block in 1985.1
It is not surprising that this is Lina Bo Bardi’s favorite statement about the building, since
few artists of the twentieth century positioned themselves so radically against aesthetic
preconceptions and within the realm of everyday life as Cage did. In a documentary ilm
completed shortly ater Bo Bardi’s death, the architect’s gravelly voice is heard as the cam-
era pans the façade: “The museum was a ‘nothing,’ a search for freedom, the elimination of
obstacles, the capacity to be free in the presence of things.”2 More than any other architect
of the twentieth century, Bo Bardi atempted to achieve a freedom from the limitations
imposed by cultural, political, and stylistic categorizations. As her largest completed build-
ing project, the MASP still enables visitors to experience the architect’s radical curiosity.
In terms of its position within its urban seting—and within the history of archi-
tecture—the museum was inspired by a radical application of modern concepts of space:
As discussed in the following, Bo Bardi tested the outer limits of the idea of the open
ground loor, the suspended structure, and the transparent interior. So fundamental
to modern architecture, these three ideas have been manifested in the MASP in such a
massive dimension that they exceed the scope of their initial idea. The concept of the
design and its manifestation in urban space must therefore be viewed in the context of
the architecture of late modernism. Unlike architects such as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
and Oscar Niemeyer, who developed their own vocabulary of architectural elements out
of these modernist concepts, Lina Bo Bardi sought a means of expressing society and

103
culture beyond a formal or stylistic signature. How far she took this approach P. 102
The Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP), 2014
is relected in her statement, made twenty years ater the construction of the
MASP—that the museum “could even be described as ugly”; her intention was
“not beauty, but freedom.”3
Since its inauguration on November 7, 1968, the MASP has served as a landmark
on the site of the former Belvedere Trianon, with the Trianon Park behind it on Avenida
Paulista. Anyone driving downhill on Avenida 9 de Julho just before the road disappears
into a tunnel sees the red pillar-and-beam structure, which at the time of its construction
spanned the largest open space existing under a permanently occupied structure with a
lat roof, worldwide. That the body of the museum simultaneously seems to be hovering
while being powerfully lited is only one of the structure’s ambivalent characteristics.
On October 2, 1947, the irst Museu de Arte de São Paulo was opened on the sec-
ond loor of the “Diários Associados” headquarters in downtown São Paulo. Francisco de
Assis Chateaubriand, founder and owner of Brazil’s largest media network of newspa-
pers, radio stations, and television stations, had appointed Pietro Maria Bardi as curator.
With a wide range of lectures and courses, the museum appealed to children and adults
and viewed itself as an educational institution for people from all social strata. Lina Bo
Bardi designed the rooms in which some ity paintings on loan from a private collector
were displayed. The paintings were mounted onto thin metal steles spanned between
the loor and ceiling of the room and seemed to hover in space. The Italian architec-
ture magazine Metron commented in 1948 on the stringent airiness of the exhibition as a
model example of a transatlantic transfer through the émigré couple:
“When Rationalist architecture repeats European themes on a large
scale, it oten appears merely as an enlargement of the designs upon MASP under construction with Trianon Park behind it, 1962
SABINE VON FISCHER 104
Construction site of MASP, 1964 which it is modeled: ambitious but expressionless and sometimes without any artistic
merit. The introduction of the Bardi-Bo coeicient into Brazilian culture will certainly
have a positive efect. Bardi brings with him a historic grounding as well as moral and
intellectual drive; Lina Bo contributes an element of precision and exactitude, a poétique
mathématique.”4
This prophecy of their ability to adequately translate the architectural language of
Rationalism into a non-European context was permanently manifested in the following
project, at the second location of the MASP on Avenida Paulista, through a political pro-
cess in which the inluence of the media on politics and economics factored prominently.
Instead of constructing the museum at the intended site in the center of the city, Lina
Bo Bardi had the idea of building the museum on the outlook terrace of the demolished
Trianon, in an outlying district of the city, which until then had been a site of stately man-
ors and the gardens of cofee plantation owners. With the museum the district would
gain a new cultural signiicance. Bo Bardi and Chateaubriand’s head secretary, Edmundo
Monteiro, pressured the city administration in 1957 with all the means at their disposal—
including the promise to support the major in his campaign for the presidency—to receive
permission to build on this site.5 They were granted the property on the condition that
they would not obstruct the view over the city from Trianon Park, a stipulation that
became a key factor in the project.
The construction of the new MASP began in late 1960 but was interrupted the fol-
lowing year and only started up again in 1962–63. Ater the military coup of 1964, work
at the construction site came to such a lull that it almost stopped altogether (see this
page).6 The museum was then completed between 1966 and 1968. With every interruption
of the construction process, the plans for the building were called into question and
105 THE HORIZONS OF LINA BO BARDI
new variations for the supporting structure were considered; ground plans and, above
all, designs for the façade were redrawn. Common to all the designs for the MASP on
Avenida Paulista is a clear separation of the building into a base structure on the slope
and the main body of the museum suspended over the Belvedere Trianon. The societal
functions formerly housed in the Trianon were situated in the base structure: an open
foyer with sculptural X-shaped red stairs leading to subterranean exhibition spaces, a
small and a large theater, and the workshops. The suspended museum structure holds a
loor for oices and alternating exhibitions and, above that, the main exhibition loor for
the art collection of the MASP, the scope and value of which had been enhanced expo-
nentially under the aegis of Chateaubriand and the Bo and Bardi couple.
Adhering to the shape of the slope and the horizon, while framing the space between
the two, the architecture of the museum atests to the potential of freedom. It was Lina Bo
Bardi’s belief that architecture is not indebted to a political system but to the past, present,
and future; it constitutes a “collective and sociopolitical art form at the service of society.”7
At ground level: openness
The space of the main body of the museum is open to interpretation. Is it an “open
ground loor”? Or is it part of the city and public space? A paved stone surface extends
underneath the museum from the curb of the street to the end of the terrace, which itself
has a dual function: as an outlook and a place for public events. The stipulation that the
site on Avenida Paulista be built without vertical supports ultimately led to one of the
most radical solutions in the twentieth century for the ground level of a museum building.
Between the four massive concrete pillars at seventy-four and nineteen meters in distance is
an open space under a concrete slab. On both sides of this nineteen-meter width, the lower
slab extends ive meters; thus the suspended ceiling covers an area of seventy-four times
twenty-nine meters at a height of eight meters. Bo Bardi played out the various possibilities
as to what could take place on and underneath these surfaces many times in her sketches.
The enormous vertical pillars and the equally enormous horizontal beams of
pre-stressed, reinforced concrete hold the loor slab and the roof slab of the main loor,
SABINE VON FISCHER 106
from which the lowest horizontal slab is suspended (see p. 108). Although José Carlos de
Figueiredo Ferraz, a pioneer of Brazilian engineering, had already developed a system of
pre-stressed, reinforced concrete, he initially viewed the span of over seventy meters as
uterly unrealistic, since it posed a challenge to the conventions of safety and stability. But
ultimately it was in fact possible to bring together technology and art in a “splendid, har-
monious symbiosis” according to Ferraz.8 The red coloring as shown in some of the early
sketches had initially been rejected. The red protective and waterprooing paint, as applied
to the support structure in 1991, optically unites the vertical pillars and horizontal beams
into a uniied frame. This also sets the bearing structure apart from the body of the build-
ing. The spatial potential of the open plan is expressed in the MASP building, to the point
of the impossibility of architectural categorization; there is no interior on the ground loor,
but a public space underneath a concrete cover; merely an inconspicuous set of stairs next
to one of the pillars leads to the loor above. The space beneath the suspended body is
open and lends itself to collective use. This “open ground plan” is readily perceived as being
expansive and almost endless. It seems as if the MASP wished to prove that the built envi-
ronment and freedom do not contradict, but condition one another.
The possibility of implementing the modern dream of an inside–outside continu-
ity without barriers in subtropical areas holds a compelling fascination. However, the
MASP draws less on a lack of a physical threshold between these two realms and more
on the programmatic idea of opening up. The museum wishes to serve as an educational
institution, where cultural exchange and critical thinking are fostered, and where the
boundaries between art and the everyday are permeable.9 It is not the only building
dating from the late sixties, in which pedagogical intentions played an important role in
the architecture. For the Faculdade de Arquitetura e Urbanismo (FAU) of the
Design for MASP, 1963
Pencil, colored pencil, felt-tipped pen, photo collages,
Universidade de São Paulo, a building which opened less than a year ater
and blueprint on paper, 100 × 99.9 cm the MASP, architect João Batista Vilanova Artigas developed new teaching
107 THE HORIZONS OF LINA BO BARDI
Sections and views of MASP, with photosmethods in conjunction with the structure.10 Vilanova Artigas
of models, 1963
Ballpoint pen on paper, 22.2 × 34.5 cm
also worked under ambivalent political conditions. In 1964, he
was arrested in front of his students during the military dic-
tatorship and went into exile. In 1966, he returned and built
the departmental building, which is largely known through a photograph of its interior
courtyard, taken during a student protest in 1969 (see p. 37).11 Just like the images showing
crowds of people gathered beneath the MASP, photographs of the inner courtyard at the
FAU portray the building as a space of collective thought and action (see p. 38).
Unlike Vilanova Artigas, Bo Bardi had never been part of the (male) architecture net-
work in São Paulo that had been inluenced by European Brutalism, perhaps because she
tended to work from a conceptual rather a formal approach in terms of her architectural
designs.12 Bo Bardi’s understanding of modernism was not shaped by Italian Rationalism
alone. From 1958 to 1965 in Bahia, she continued the anthropological research that she had
pursued in Italy. This was also the period in which she planned the MASP.
The completed building helps apprehend her aim of using the immediacy of béton
brut as a means to convey the program of the building. However, the openness of the
ground and main loor has since repeatedly run counter to the current museum admin-
istration’s curatorial, control, and security needs, as demonstrated by the drywall parti-
tions erected in the museum interior in 1996 and the repeated installment of barriers
in the open area beneath the suspended building block.13 The various appropriations
of the open space along Avenida Paulista have demonstrated how this public space has
undergone a process of constant change over the nearly ive decades of use: sometimes
a square without a particular program, sometimes a stage, sometimes a realm for indi-
vidual action, and sometimes a collective space.

A freed structure: the suspended block

Two further concepts of modern architecture, which Bo Bardi radicalizes in
terms of her design are the free structure, as propagated by Le Corbusier in his con-
cept of pilotis, the free façade, and the free ground plan, all of which were articulated

109 THE HORIZONS OF LINA BO BARDI

in his famous “Five Points of a New Architecture” from 1927. The body of the museum Façade design for the MASP, 1963
Ballpoint pen on paper, 22.2 x 34.5 cm
suspended over the Belvedere Trianon is a block that hovers above the ground, the
façade of which had assumed a wide range of articulations in the various phases of
its design.
In the early designs, the museum looked over the city with closed exterior sides.
Depicted as a vast surface of stone, the façade was to be used as a projection surface for
ilms, for the individual imagination, or as a backdrop for works of art installed out in
the open for the general public. In various images, the surface is depicted as decorated
with plants and sculptures. These drawings and collages recall the idea of a dynamic,
collective imagination, as formulated by architectural historian Sigfried Giedion, painter
and sculptor Fernand Léger, and architect and urban planner Josép Lluis Sert in their
manifesto for a new kind of monumentality in 1943.14
The idea of a closed, stone façade was gradually rejected, and the MASP was built
with a glass, curtain wall façade.15 This came about for two reasons, which altered the
underlying assumptions of the design. On the one hand, it became important that the
façade exert less weight on the bearing structure; one the other, the idea of an introverted
museum structure no longer corresponded to its cultural mission. The material of glass
had appeared in another early study for a new building of the MASP, in the form of a
glass pyramid.16 Whereas there, the glass was conceived as a prismatic surface in the real-
ized building it implies a political and social transparency, which—regard-
less of curatorial measures to ward of the rays of the sun—was intended to
bring the museum interior and the city closer together.
Already in an earlier project that was never constructed, a design com- MASP after being completed, still without the
pleted in 1951 for the Museu à Beira do Oceano in the small city of São Vicente, protective coat of red paint, 1968
Lina Bo Bardi applied a full glass façade facing the sea, thus creating an efect Project design for the Museu à Beira do Oceano in
that causes the landscape to serve as a backdrop for the exhibition.17 The São Vicente, 1951

SABINE VON FISCHER 110 111 THE HORIZONS OF LINA BO BARDI

litle museum situated between mountains and sea is oten considered a Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, design for a national theater
in Mannheim, 1953 © Chicago History Museum
forerunner to the MASP, and although it preigures some of the formal
elements of this building (on a smaller scale), it does not have its radical-
ity. The idea of creating a rhythm across the large structure through the
placement of multiple support elements cuting across it—in São Vicente there are ive
supporting frames placed along the twenty-ive-meter-long structure—was incorporated
by Bo Bardi into her initial studies for the MASP. The stipulation in São Paulo of not
obstructing the view demanded that the support structure be placed lengthwise. Fur-
ther elements difer between the two museum designs: whereas the hovering main body
of the building in São Vicente is penetrated in three places—from below for an entry
ramp, from above for a planted courtyard, and through the loor and ceiling for a tree—
in São Paulo there is only an inconspicuous staircase and elevator. As Bo Bardi writes, the
MASP was supposed to distance itself from any “inlated cultural importance,” appear-
ing as rough and immediate as possible.18
The motif of the hovering glass block, hanging from a supporting frame and con-
taining a large hall free of pillars within, appears repeatedly in the modern architecture
of the postwar period. In its purest form, it is found in Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s design
for the Mannheim Nationaltheater from 1953.19 A volume with a surface area of eighty by
160 meters, suspended by seven metal frames, loats above a base clad in marble. By using
steel trusses, Mies drew on the formal vocabulary of modern industrial architecture and
atempted to achieve an ultimate reinement of detail at the connection between the
pillars and the beams, as well as a cultivated elegance in the façade’s composition. The
rough concrete of Lina Bo Bardi’s MASP has litle in common with Mies’s elegant design
for Mannheim, even if the early sketches for both projects resemble one another in terms
of their series of crosswise structural frames.
The inauguration of the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin on September 15, 1968, less
than two months before the opening of the MASP, almost forces a comparison between
the museum spaces of Mies van der Rohe and Lina Bo Bardi. Both structures are deined
by their open spaces within façades completely made of glass; both have an underground
SABINE VON FISCHER 112
level situated below a terrace and set of from the loor above.
Oscar Niemeyer, headquarters of the Mondadori publishing house,
built between 1970 and 1974
However, in terms of their positioning, the two museums could
not be more diferent. In Berlin, entering the museum is celebrated like a ritual; a plinth
with steps up to the glass volume. In São Paulo, the sequence difers greatly: the space
of the street extends without a threshold beneath the museum. The visitors then reach
the upper levels of the museum in an abrupt vertical movement, via a set of stairs. At
the MASP, the museum space is less the culmination of a spatial sequence and more the
multiplication of the public, open terrace on the Belvedere Trianon. In 1967 in Berlin, the
heavy roof construction of the elevated exhibition level was hydraulically raised and
placed on an elaborate system of slender supports.20 In contrast, the massive pillars and
beams of reinforced concrete in São Paulo are a constant demonstration of the struc-
tural force required to suspend the open structure of the MASP.
A further interpretation of open space inside the suspended block form appears
in the work of the Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer, in his 1968 design for the head-
quarters of the Mondadori publishing house outside of Milan, which was constructed
between 1970 and 1974. Here, too, a glass body hangs from a series of concrete frames
set at distances of three to iteen meters apart from one another, forming an arcade.
The rhythmical sculpture of the arches before the backdrop of the glass body is the
eye-catcher, not the open space at ground level. The openness conceived by Niemeyer is
emphasized more in the interior structure of the oice space and less in the open view
beneath the building, which is suspended only slightly above the ground.21 Conversely,
in the building designed by the Italian who had made Brazil her home, the openness
refers to the space beneath the museum, and its replication on the main exhibition loor.
Interior space: layered depth and transparency
Seventy-four meters in length, twenty-nine meters wide, and fully open; the space
beneath the museum is duplicated in the exhibition loor above. The interior of this space
also tests the limits of the vocabulary of modern architecture. The exhibition design origi-
nally conceived by Lina Bo Bardi breaks with many conventions. On this upper level of
113 THE HORIZONS OF LINA BO BARDI
the museum, bordered merely by vast window fronts and shorter end walls, there are nei- diference.23 This placement of the horizon line under-
Lina Bo Bardi, design for an exhibition at the Museu à Beira do Oceano, 1951
ther surfaces for hanging pictures nor any enclosed areas. Instead the space is—literally— scores the horizontality of the space. Lina Bo Bardi’s
completely exposed. The installation inside the space does not dictate a chronological or drawings indicate spatial transparency by a further efect
sequential narrative along a path that viewers are to take, but allows them to make their that is known among Mies’s representational techniques: in the collage of an interior for
own connections between the paintings mounted on glass steles. Lina Bo Bardi designed Mies’s Museum for a Small City (1941–43), two female igures by Aristide Maillol are placed
the mounts for the paintings like easels, in the idiom of the free-standing (see pp. 185, 191). in front of Pablo Picasso’s Guernica to create a staggered spatial dynamic. In the same
This form of non-contextual presentation can be understood as a pedagogy of emancipa- manner, the Italian-Brazilian architect mounts the objects in the exhibition in a manner so
tion and a release from the conventions of the elitism of art institutions. that the space forms the framework of coordinates for movement in between them.
The open exhibition loor does not draw on the notions of “phenomenal trans- Unlike Mies, Bo Bardi was neither interested in perfecting details nor elegance in
parency” current in the architecture discourses since the sixties, which were perhaps the structural frame or interior. Working in an era of user-oriented planning practices,
relevant to Bo Bardi’s early designs for the MASP, in which the façade was conceived as exempliied by Cedric Price’s design for the Fun Palace in London, she considered the
as a closed projection surface and the interior received light through tilted windows in appropriation of architecture during its use a constituent of the design. Her drawings
the roof.22 The version of the MASP that was actually constructed literally atempts to and collages for the MASP are full of people and things in movement—changeable, col-
overlay the interior space and exterior space by means of a fully transparent façade, orful, sometimes in a chaotic coexistence that takes its inspiration more from everyday
overcoming the separation between the two. The space acts as a container of possibili- life than the world of art.
ties—also of the potentialities lying beyond the boundaries of the museum space. Lina Bo and Pietro Maria Bardi presented the art audience of the Brazilian metrop-
The idea of layering interior and exterior space is already apparent in the collage olis with a concept of the modern that combined the (European) Rationalist tradition in
that Bo Bardi made in 1951 for her unbuilt Museu à Beira do Oceano project. In the image, architecture with an anthropologically based interest in ordinary life. Entailing the idea
the objects from the exhibition are carried over onto a clif that rises up from the sea. The of the Gesamtkunstwerk, on the one hand, and a call for active and critical observation, on
threshold from the museum loor to the surface of the ocean is illustrated by the gradual the other, the concept of the MASP presented a paradox that had already been explored
shit in gray tones along the progression of a line that suggests less a boundary than a in the context of Italian museology.24 The lighting of an exhibition loor from the side and
transition—from the objects of art to the object of a landscape. In the atempt to make the having the exhibits exposed to daylight, however, also did not correspond to the common
transition from the inside to the outside so luid that it seems to dissipate, this museum curatorial practices in the sixties, and posed challenges to the use of the museum in terms
design addressed a core concern of modern architecture. of its preservation. Nevertheless, the ideas underlying the radical design are of boundless
The collages of the interiors of the museum in São Vicente and the museum in impact. In 1970, Lina Bo Bardi explained her intention as having been “to destroy the aura
São Paulo again recall projects by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. that usually surrounds a museum and to present the work of art as the prophecy of a work
In a number of these perspective drawings, the middle of that is accessible to all.”25
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Museum for a Small City, 1942
the wall is situated precisely at eye level. The drawings could Interior Perspective, pencil and cut-out reproductions on illustration board,
An unforgetable scene for me was the instance when I sought shelter under the
be easily turned upside-down without anyone noticing the 76.1 x 101.5 cm MASP with dozens of other people as a tropical rainfall swept over São Paulo. This

SABINE VON FISCHER 114 115 THE HORIZONS OF LINA BO BARDI

collective moment reminded me of the now iconic images of crowds Lina Bo Bardi on the MASP construction site with a mockup
of the glass easels
gathered for an art performance or a concert in this same location, but
we were all there merely because of the weather. At that moment the
Belvedere Trianon seemed to be the most open and robust place that I had ever expe-
rienced—a space that was by no means ordinary but that provided plenty of room for
ordinary life to unfold.

1 Lina Bo Bardi, “Uma aula de Arquitetura,”
recording of a lunch conversation on the
occasion of the exhibition at the Facul-
dade de Arquitetura e Urbanismo at the
Universidade de São Paulo in April 1989 by
Cecília Rodrigues dos Santos, in Projeto 3,
no. 149 (January–February 1992), pp. 59–64;
see p. 61. For an Italian / English trans-
lation, see “L’ultima lezione,” Domus 65,
no. 753 (October 1993), pp. 14–24.
2 Lina Bo Bardi, color film, 50 minutes, di-
rected by Aurélio Michiles and Isa Grin-
spum (São Paulo, 1993). Also quoted in Bo
Bardi 1992 (see note 1).
3 Ibid.
4 “Sistemazione di un museo in Brasile:
Un museo dell’architetto Lina Bo,” Metron:
Rivista internazionale di architettura
23, no. 30 (November–December 1948),
pp. 34–35.
5 Olivia de Oliveira, Subtle Substances: The
Architecture of Lina Bo Bardi (São Paulo,
2006), p. 261.
6 Zeuler R. Lima, Lina Bo Bardi (New Haven,
2013), pp. 122–37.
7 Bo Bardi 1992 (see note 1), p. 61.
8 José Carlos de Figueiredo Ferraz, “Ferraz
e a utopia em concreto,” in MASP: A cor a
paixão pela arte, brochure published on
the occasion of red paint being applied
to the support structure (São Paulo,
1990), n. p.
9 Renato Anelli, “Das transparente Museum
und die Entheiligung der Kunst,” in Bar-
bara Steiner and Charles Esche, eds.,
Mögliche Museen, (Cologne, 2007), pp.
63–76; see p. 68. Anelli also states that the
design, foregoing any external form of
sun protection, is characteristic of Lina
Bo Bardi’s radical approach; see p. 75.
10 Marcelo Carvalho Ferraz et al., eds., Vila­
nova Artigas (São Paulo, 1997), pp. 101–13;
Sabine von Fischer and Srdjan Jovanovic
Weiss, “How to Read Two Monoliths,”
Cabinet 2, no. 6 (Spring 2002), pp. 25–29.
11 Ana María León, “Designing Dissent:
Vilanova Artigas and the São Paulo
School of Architecture,” in Ines Weizman,
ed., Architecture and the Paradox of Dis­
sidence (London, 2013), pp. 74–88.
12 Yves Bruand, “Arquitetura Contemporâ-
neo no Brasil,” diss. Paris 1973, São Paulo,
1997, pp. 269–70; Catherine Veikos, Intro­
duction to Lina Bo Bardi: The Theory of
Architectural Practice (New York, 2014),
pp. 42–43.
13 In December 2013, the Instituto Lina Bo
e P. M. Bardi made a call for a collective
hug as a protest action against the barri-
ers in the public space beneath the MASP.
See www.institutobardi.com.br/noticia.
asp?d=16 (last accessed July 7, 2014). In
February 2014, the court ruled that ticket
counters and the barriers must be re-
moved. See htp://www1.folha.uol.com.br/
cotidiano/2014/02/1416157-justica-pede
-plano-para-retirada-de-bilheteria-no
-vao-do-masp.shtml (last accessed July 7,
2014). Numerous newspaper and magazine
articles reported on this conflict, such
as “Musée en peril: un espace trop libre,”
Architecture d’aujourd’hui 320 (Janu-
ary 1999), pp. 134–39; there was also an
exhibition and symposium on the topic
entitled Open Space: Continuation and
Crisis, Avery Hall, Columbia University,
New York, September 20 – October 22,
1999, curated by Anne Save de Beau-
recueil, Sabine von Fischer, Franklin
Lee, Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss, and Evan
Douglis. For a floor plan with the plas-
terboard walls installed in the main ex-
hibition space at the MASP, see Sabine
von Fischer, Concrete Levitation: Lina
Bo Bardi and Brazil, an Architectural
Journey / Schwebender Beton: Lina Bo
Bardi und Brasilien, eine Architektu­
reise (New York, 2000), p. 11.
14 José Luis Sert et al., “Nine Points on
Monumentality” (1943). For the German,
see: Sigfried Giedion, Architektur und Ge­
meinschaft: Tagebuch einer Entwicklung
(Hamburg, 1956), pp. 40–42.
15 For a detailed description of the design
and construction process, see Lima 2013
(see note 6), pp. 127ff. Lina Bo Bardi also
studied whether the MASP could be
linked with the gardens of Trianon Park
by a bridge across the multi-lane Ave-
nida Paulista.
16 Oliveira 2006 (see note 5), pp. 266ff.
17 Isa Grinspum Ferraz et al., eds., Lina Bo
Bardi (Milan, 1994), pp. 90–93; Lina Bo
Bardi, “Museu à beira do oceano,” Habitat
1 (July–September 1952), pp. 6–11; Sabine
von Fischer, “Die Konstruktion des of-
fenen Raums als Referenz zum Horizont,”
TransForm 2 (January 1998), pp. 92–96.
18 Ferraz et al. 1994 (see note 17), pp. 100–15;
see p. 102.
19 Thilo Hilpert, ed., Mies van der Rohe im
Nachkriegsdeutschland: Das Theaterpro­
jekt Mannheim 1953 (Leipzig, 2001).
20 Gabriela Wachter, ed., Mies van der Rohes
Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin (Berlin,
1995), p. 69.
21 Giorgio Calanca, Ezio Galli, Giorgio Mura-
tore, “La sede della Mondadori a Segrate:
Una ‘architettura pubblicitaria,’” Casa­
bella 41, no. 424 (April 1977), pp. 37–42. See
also www.oscarniemeyer.com.br/obra/
pro149 (last accessed July 7, 2014).
22 See Colin Rowe and Robert Slutzky,
“Transparency: Literal and Phenomenal,”
Perspecta 8 (1963), pp. 45–54.
23 Robin Evans has discussed the effect
of horizontal symmetry in perspective
drawing through the example of Mies’s
drawings for the Barcelona Pavilion
(1928–29). Robin Evans, “Mies von der
Rohe’s Paradoxical Symmetries,” AA Files
19 (Spring 1990), pp. 56–68.
24 Anelli 2007 (see note 9), pp. 68ff.
25 Lina Bo Bardi, “Explicações sobre o Museu
de Arte [1970],” quoted in ibid. (see note 9),
p. 65.
Antiques market on the belvedere of
MASP, 2014

SABINE VON FISCHER 116

 Brazil’s
Alternative
Path
to
Modernism

Edited by Andres Lepik and Vera Simone Bader

With texts by
Renato Anelli, Vera Simone Bader, Marina Correia,
Anna Carboncini, Gabriella Cianciolo Cosentino,
Sabine von Fischer, Steffen Lehmann,
Andres Lepik , Zeuler R. Lima, Olivia de Oliveira,
Cathrine Veikos, and Guilherme Wisnik
Introduction The Horizons of Lina Bo Bardi: 103 Lina Bo and P. M. Bardi: 185 Casa do Benin 317
The Museu de Arte de São Paulo Fragments of a Dialogue
“Simplicidade e Clareza ”: 17 in the Context of European Anna Carboncini Ladeira da Misericórdia 327
Lina Bo Bardi as a Role Model Postwar Concepts of Architecture
Andres Lepik Sabine von Fischer São Paulo City Hall 337
Projects
The Hands of the People: 119
Essays SESC Pompeia Casa de Vidro 195 Appendix
Cathrine Veikos
A History of Lina Bo Bardi’s 35 Casa Cirell 209 Lina Bo Bardi in the Present: 349
Critical Reception “Truth in the Vernacular”: 135 On the Conception of the
Guilherme Wisnik Contextualizing the Late Work Casa do Chame-Chame 221 Exhibition
of Lina Bo Bardi Marina Correia
Early Years and Wartime: 51 Stefen Lehmann Solar do Unhão 227
Lina Bo Bardi’s Illustrations and Lina Bo Bardi's Life and Work 355
Journalism in Italy (1940–46) Myth, Popular Culture, and 153 Museu de Arte de São Paulo 237
Gabriella Cianciolo Cosentino Collective Memory: Bibliography 362
The Humanistic and Symbolic Igreja Espírito Santo do Cerrado 255
Between Cabinets of Curiosities 67 Dimension in the Work of Image credits 365
and Teatro Povero: Lina Bo Bardi SESC Pompeia 265
Lina Bo Bardi’s Tactics of Display Olivia de Oliveira Acknowledgments 366
Zeuler R. Lima Capela Santa Maria dos Anjos 285
Lina Bo Bardi and Her 169
From Italy to Brazil: 87 Relationship to Brazil’s Economic Anhangabaú Tobogã 293
From Vernacular Building and Social Development Policy
to Modern Architecture Renato Anelli Teatro Oficina 299
Vera Simone Bader
The Historic Center of Salvador, 309
Bahia