Study for furniture design at Milan Triennale

Lina Bo Bardi was an Italian-born Brazillian architect and designer whose large body of work contributed to the modernism movement of the 1940's and 50's. Today she is regarded as one of the most prolific 20th century female architects.

Earning her degree in architecture in 1939 at the University of Rome, Bo Bardi began a career in design journalism after graduation, working on a variety of Italian magazines and publications. She moved to Brazil in 1946 and began working with the MASP (The Museum of São Paulo), designing displays, hanging systems, and furniture for the museum interior.

In 1950, Lina and her husband founded the magazine Habitat; the most influential architectural magazine in Brazil at the time. According to the MoMA, Bo Bardi spent the 50's exploring Brazil; “studying Indigenous, ancestral, rural, and vernacular expressions and mapping them through exhibitions and the pages of Habitat”. 

In 1958 Bo Bardi designed a new building for the MASP, as it had outgrown its initial space. Her most ambitious work however was for the SESC Pompéia, a cultural center in São Paulo that was completed in 1986. 

This piece is one of almost one hundred of drawings and studies done by Bo Bardi that were part of the Lina Bo Bardi Draws exhibition held at the Carnegie Museum of Art in 2020.