Designed by a lifelong communist for a wealthy media magnate, Lina Bo Bardi’s uncompromising art museum is full of contradictions – just like the Italian architect’s life.
From the city side, the museum appears as a single-glazed bar held up by massive concrete arms like a subterranean giant reaching out to embrace it. Credit: Eduardo Ortega
There’s nothing easy about São Paulo. Occupying a geographic expanse just a shade smaller than London’s, with a population half again larger, the city is big across almost every metric, and its problems are correspondingly large: lots of traffic, lots of pollution, lots of inequality. It’s a bold, brash, exciting place, full of surprises good and bad, and not for the faint of heart.
Much the same could be said for its premier art museum—as well, indeed, for the woman who designed it. The Museu de Art São Paulo (MASP) is an emphatic cymbal crash of a building, sophisticated and urbane without being in any sense precious, just like the metropolis whose name it bears. Sitting right on the Avenida Paulista, the city’s premier boulevard, the museum is also suspended improbably over the Avenida Nove de Julho, a quasi-highway that tunnels through the hillside and pops out beyond the Parque Trianon across the street. For Lina Bo Bardi, the Italian-born architect who ushered it into the world, MASP is the tough, concrete-and-glass capstone of a career spent straddling contradictions.
The fact that Bo Bardi, a native Roman and lifelong communist, should end up building a major cultural project in Brazil on behalf of a patrician client is rather a puzzle. Having studied design in her hometown, the architect moved to Milan in 1940, aligning herself with the protean modernist Gió Ponti and producing mostly graphic work for his publication and various others. Following the Second World War, she became the wife of Pietro Maria Bardi, and though the pairing was all by measures a success it represents not the least of Bo’s many personal paradoxes: Pietro, in his work as a critic and promoter of modern art, had been a cultural adjutant to Benito Mussolini’s government; Bo Bardi, by her own account at least, was an uncompromising antifascist who had risked her life to oppose the regime. The decision, immediately after their marriage, to move halfway across the world—and to a country whose majority language neither of them spoke—may have been influenced by their discomfiting political position at home.
Once arrived, however, Bo Bardi took immediately to her adoptive nation, committing herself with her husband to the development of Brazil’s nascent modern movement. Among the couple’s first and closest connections in South America was the wealthy media magnate Assis Chateaubriand, an avid collector and cultural ambassador— and actual ambassador to the UK no less— devoted, like the Bardis, to bringing the world to Brazil and vice versa. Though he described himself as “a hillbilly by nature,” Chateaubriand was nothing if not worldly, to the point of being a bit of a Machiavel: having beaten the former British Prime Minister to a painting at a Christie’s auction, Chateaubriand attempted to smooth things over by awarding Winston Churchill the Brazilian ‘Order of the Vaquero’; appeased at first, Sir Winston was subsequently appalled to find that Chateaubriand had made up the honor himself, and that Vaquero means cowhand in Portuguese. In the pursuit of art, apparently nothing was off limits, and in his collaboration with his new architect Chateaubriand would finally find someone with the same bloody-minded determination.
While the long glass front is in keeping with the then-current International Style, the muscular concrete feels like a presentiment of the more organic brutalist style of Bo Bardi’s later work. Credit: Ilana Bessler
Featuring mostly works from his extensive collection of Old Masters, the museum began life in 1947, sharing quarters in a large office building with interiors created by Bo Bardi. After expanding the collection, putting it on the road, and diversifying the institution’s aims and outreach to include contemporary exhibitions alongside historical ones, the museum seemed ready for its own home, and with aid from public officials the property above the narrow valley (now the freeway) was cleared and secured in 1956. The only question: what would Bo Bardi put there? Her catalogue of original ground-up work thus far consisted more or less exclusively of her own home, the Casa de Vidro or Glass House—an extraordinary exercise in Corbusian tropicalismo, but hardly of the scale or complexity necessary for a major public facility. A decade into her Brazilian adventure, MASP would be the first true test of the architect’s emerging regionalist design philosophy, and of her own mettle.
She did not disappoint. The building she completed in 1968 (inaugurated by no less a personage than the late Queen of England) appears from the Paulista side to comprise a single glazed bar, more than a little reminiscent of Bo Bardi’s home just outside the city, but here held up by two massive concrete arms like a subterranean giant reaching out to embrace it. On the further side, exhibition space, offices, a library and other auxiliary functions are contained in a concrete-framed structure descending down the slope in terraced rows—the giant’s body perhaps, with the cars passing under him and people wandering across his belly, on the broad plaza shaded by the lofted glass volume. As striking as anything are the colours of each of these elements: the red of the structural brace; the beige of the frame and plaza; the black of the glass.
As a manifesto for a putative national architecture, Bo Bardi’s MASP speaks clearly of some of those things she plainly imagined to be central to an essentially Brazilian— and, incidentally, essentially paulistano— variety of modernism. But it also points, again and again, to the conflicts at the core of her practice. The long grass front, perfectly in keeping with the then-current International Style, put São Paulo in a league with modernist meccas like Berlin, where Mies’s Neue National galerie opened the same year; and yet those muscly concrete arms feel entirely different, a presentiment of the more organic, brutalist work Bo Bardi would pursue later, as in her remarkable SESC Pompéia of 1986. The plaza, with its rational, public character seems to intimate just the kind egalitarian society that the architect hoped the country might come to embody; strange to consider that at the same time she was building it, Brazilian democracy was being upended by a military dictatorship. Bo Bardi herself would speak of the building, and all her later work, as reflecting her encounters with Brazil’s poor and indigenous communities, “a lesson of popular experience,” as she called it. Yet her most famous building is marked chiefly by technological stridency, and was built for a wealthy press baron with the full cooperation of an oppressive junta.
Bo Bardi didn’t leave the country during that dictatorship either, which points to the last of the unresolved mysteries of her life and work. Having given São Paulo a concentrated expression of itself, Bo Bardi would go on, especially following her death in 1992, to acquire secular canonization as a feminist icon, a woman producing confident, swaggering buildings in a field usually dominated by confident, swaggering men. Yet her own politics do not align with those of her most ardent latter-day admirers. “I am a Stalinist, a militant, and an antifeminist,” Bo Bardi once declared: her Marxism would have little truck with the bourgeois trappings of the woman’s movement as it had evolved in most of the West. Once again—as with MASP, as with São Paulo itself—appreciating Bo Bardi’s work and her thought doesn’t necessarily require approving of all its aspects, or even understanding them. The challenge of it, in all its unnavigable and unwieldy wonder, is the pleasure.
