Book, Lina a Biography[LS]

Few public figures were more Brazilian than the Italian architect Lina Bo Bardi. Arriving in Brazil shortly after World War II, she became so attached to Brazilian culture that she became one of its main interpreters, capable of reading local traditions that was both rigorous and comprehensive. Architecture critic and accomplished essayist, Francesco Perrotta-Bosch examines the trajectory of this brilliant artist in light of the following question: how a foreigner was able to see so much of a country that was not her own, to the point of translating it into the Brazilians themselves? For Lina Bo Bardi, everything could be designed, from architecture to magazine pages, from cultural institutions to menus, from events to memories. She wanted to decide everything — even her country. Lina had a horror of officialdom and the social rites of bourgeois life. She was a communist, played an important role in combating the military regime, but was also the mistress of a majestic modernist house in Morumbi and wife of Pietro Maria Bardi, the all-powerful chosen by Assis Chateaubriand to create and manage the São Paulo Museum of Art . Based on extensive research, a meticulous survey of unpublished sources, based on dozens of interviews, Brazilian and Italian bibliography, but above all narrated with lightness and an ingenious temporal structure, this book takes the possibilities of the biographical genre to the limit. Like Lina's work, it is dense, joyful and seductive.