Italian-Brazilian architect and designer; one of the major figures of 20th-century Brazilian modernism and, over the last thirty years, the subject of a sustained international rediscovery that has placed her work beside Oscar Niemeyer's and Lúcio Costa's as a central reference point for modernist architecture in Latin America. Her buildings, furniture, exhibitions, writings, and editorial work share a consistent program: a modernism reshaped by an ethnographic respect for Brazilian popular culture and by an explicit political commitment to making cultural institutions available to ordinary people.
Born Achillina Bo in Rome, she trained at the Faculty of Architecture in Rome, worked in Milan in the years of late fascism, collaborated with Gio Ponti on the magazine Domus, and emigrated to Brazil with her husband Pietro Maria Bardi in 1946, taking Brazilian citizenship in 1951. The first major building, the Casa de Vidro (Glass House) in São Paulo's Morumbi district (1951), sits a modernist glass pavilion on thin steel stilts in a forest — a Miesian vocabulary made to let the Brazilian landscape run through. The São Paulo Museum of Art (MASP) on Avenida Paulista (1957–68) is her best-known work and one of the major postwar museum buildings: an 80-meter concrete beam suspended between two red concrete piers, with the gallery floor underneath kept free as an open civic space, so that the museum cannot be entered without crossing a space that belongs to the city.
The late work at SESC Pompéia (1977–86), the cultural and recreation complex in a converted drum factory in industrial São Paulo, is the most fully realized statement of her program. Rather than demolishing the industrial shell she kept it, cleaned it, opened it to the neighborhood, and added two raw concrete towers — one for sports, one for water tanks — connected by concrete skyways. The center is now among the most loved public buildings in São Paulo, used daily by tens of thousands of people who are neither tourists nor a conventional museum public. Her furniture — the Bowl Chair (1951), the Bardi's Bowl, the wooden Frei Egídio Chair (1987) — has remained in production and in critical circulation.
Bo Bardi's writings, collected in Stones Against Diamonds (2013) and similar volumes, argue that architecture's political task is not a style but a distribution: who, on what terms, gets to occupy what space. That line has made her, in the decades since her death in 1992, one of the principal reference points for architects who want to connect modernist form to popular use, and for a reconsideration of 20th-century architecture that does not center Europe.
Bo Bardi is here because her program — architecture as the distribution of who gets to occupy what space, popular culture as a source rather than an ornament for modernism — makes her the most directly political of the graph's major architects, and a principal non-European reference point for the reconsideration of twentieth-century built form.