Brazilian Designer Lina Bo Bardi Believed in Architecture for the People. See Her Lost Sketches and Models Here

“Lina Bo Bardi: Habitat”
Museo Jumex, Mexico City

What the museum says: “Bo Bardi’s singular
contributions to the fields of architecture, design, and museum
practice are the subject of this exhibition, which also aims to
critically frame Bo Bardi’s process of unlearning, and marking a
critical distance from the Western and modernist canon, as a
pivotal aspect of her work and thought.

Like her peers, Bo Bardi’s position called for other ways of
thinking and doing that would place the human being at the center,
and that in the process opened up space for other epistemologies
and ecologies, breaking away from the logics of progress and profit
of modernity and capitalism.”

Why it’s worth a look: While architecture
enthusiasts will recognize Bo Bardi’s vision in the legacy of her
buildings, the best example being the Sao Paulo Museum of Art—a
glass-encased rectangular building suspended above the ground—this
show reveals many little known aspects of the designer’s work.

A prolific furniture and stage designer who dabbled in jewelry
and edited the magazine Habitat, Bo Bardi maintained
that humans should stay at the center of her designs, and as a
staunch communist, she was adamant that they be accessible to
everyone. In this exhibition, many of Bo Bardi’s illustrations and
architectural sketches are on view alongside reproductions of her
designs. Some of the most impressive are a cyclone-shaped staircase
she designed that is inspired by wooden ox-carts, and the
concrete-based glass easels, which are utilized in the exhibition
to dramatic effect.

What it looks like:

The post Brazilian Designer Lina Bo Bardi Believed in
Architecture for the People. See Her Lost Sketches and Models
Here appeared first on artnet News.