Table of contents: Introduction Overture - Lina's houses: overcoming contradictions First movement The glass house Interiors in the open air Two houses in one What is the ?Glass house? made of? The chame-chame house A first study -abandoned A change of course, the different studies for the house The fluctuation between ?natural? and ?unnatural? architecture Towards concise drawings and a synthesis The domestic feeling -a 'harmonic fusion' of architecture and nature, or towards overcoming contradictions The tropical garden -critique of a particular 'formal' and 'functional' architecture The house as a recounted myth/as the extraordinary Decoration, surfaces, symbols and vitality Temple house, manifesto house Interval for children The popular and the religious in lina bo bardi's work Architectural devices and linking elements Staircases From religion to play SESC Play spaces. SESC Pompéia In search of complete freedom of the body: Yves Klein, Isadora Duncan and Hélio Oiticica Second movement The masp A glass pyramid -dechristianising the notion of the museum An 'antimuseum', or a museum beyond bounds Air, light, work of art -subtle substances in Lina Bo Bardi's architecture Temple museums, house museums and the spiral theme in Lina Bo Bardi's work On the notion of time in lina bo bardi's work Convulsive spirals, the 'reverter' of time Batuque -African drums and dance Footnotes Bibliography |
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Book included in the shortlist for The Sir Nikolaus Pevsner RIBA International Book Award for Architecture 2007.
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Lina Bo Bardi, the Rome-born architect, emigrated after World War Two to Brazil, a country where she undertook her professional career. The outcome of her personal experience and of a wish to get closer to the culture and ways of life of the people, Bo Bardi?s creativity moved in the direction of an architecture that prized simplicity, spontaneity, the residual and the ephem-eral; an architecture understood as 'an organism suitable for life' which incorporated everydayness and the energy of the people who use it. As a result she used the word ?substances?, rather than ?materials?, to explain what her architecture was made of. These substances are air, light, nature and art, to which the author, Olivia de Oliveira, adds time. The work of Lina Bo Bardi, then, is presented here via a huge array of previously unpublished drawings, images, writings and projects that enable the reader to grasp in a kaleidoscopic way the power and current importance of her architecture as a critical confrontation with established reality.
