Lina Bo Bardi Drawings

Lina Bo Bardi Drawings - Lina Bo Bardi (1914–92) was one of the most prolific and visionary architects of the twentieth century. Raised in Italy under Mussolini’s Fascist regime and emigrating to Brazil after World War II, she championed the power of architecture and design to embrace everyday life. Her boldly modernist designs range from concrete-and-glass structures like the São Paulo Museum of Art and the culture and leisure center SESC Pompéia to furniture and jewelry. This is the first book to examine one of the most intimate and expressive features of her life and work, but one she rarely shared with the public―drawing.

Bo Bardi produced thousands of drawings in her lifetime, from picturesque landscapes drawn when she was a child, to sketches made as part of her daily routine as an architect, to fanciful drawings that show different aspects of her private life. In this beautifully illustrated book, Zeuler Lima, the world’s leading authority on Bo Bardi, brings together a careful selection of these and other drawings, many of them never published until now. Bo Bardi drew on card stock, tracing paper, regular paper, and newsprint. She used pencils, watercolor, gouache, ballpoint pens, and felt-tips, producing drawings that combined surrealist elements with an eye for color and joyful forms.

Lina Bo Bardi, Drawings sheds critical light on the creative sensibility behind some of the twentieth century’s most striking modernist designs, and provides a rare window into the design practice of an architect like no other.

Published in association with the Fundació Joan Miró

About the author

Zeuler R. M. de A. Lima is an architect, curator, artist, and associate professor at the School of Design and Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis. He is the author of Lina Bo Bardi and the coauthor of Albert Frey and Lina Bo Bardi: A Search for Living Architecture.