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The Italian-born Brazilian architect Lina Bo Bardi once described her discipline as ‘an adventure in which people are called to intimately participate as actors’. She might as well have been stating her philosophy for life, right down to the minutiae, as much as defining how she saw the art of creating a building.
Located in São Paulo, the Casa de Vidro (or Glass House) – her first major project, her own home and one of the most enduring pieces of Modernist architecture ever built – is made of two distinct sections. The foremost is a glass-fronted box sitting atop cobalt pylons: the stage on which life is carried out, and where the main bedrooms are situated. Running parallel is a series of smaller rooms – more sparsely populated and less transparent, these were designed as the service areas and living quarters for staff. This arrangement, these two contrasting fiefdoms of labour and leisure, could give rise to a feeling of front of house and back of house, of on-stage and behind the scenes. And well it might, were it not for the fact that at one end of the house, running from front to back and made for use by owners, guests and staff alike, Bo Bardi created in the Casa de Vidro one of the most beautiful and functional kitchens ever writ in tile and stainless steel.
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It’s often claimed to have been inspired by Corbusier’s Villa Savoye, despite the fact that it wasn’t completed until 20 years after the Glass House; to my mind, the kitchen is more reminiscent of Piero Portaluppi’s kitchen in Villa Necchi Campiglio in Milan. Long and generous, it proudly displays Bo Bardi’s affinity for cooking, as well as highlighting that her focus was never just aesthetic, but always practical too.
In this beautifully utilitarian space, the countertops and often tucked-away kitchen fittings are given as much care and attention as everything else in the Casa de Vidro. White tiles furnish much of the space; there is a stainless steel counter, deemed easiest to clean and maintain, like the black tiled mosaic floor. Besides the key details in picked out in vivid grass-green paint and glossy turquoise, it’s the rubbish shoot and the extractor hood that stand out here, designed to functional and aesthetic perfection by Bo Bardi herself. The former is a cobalt and stainless steel monolith that brings to mind a periscope, the latter a sculpture constructed delicately in glass and fine metalwork.
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A door at the far end of the kitchen leads to a relatively modest courtyard that lounges outside the formal structure of the house, leaning nonchalantly against the forest beyond. Here, Bo Bardi had two wood ovens built, slightly later additions and very much in the vernacular (reflecting, perhaps, the deepening of her relationship with Brazilian culture). Finished in bright white plaster, their gaping mouths are covered by little doors in yet more of that grassy green.
At large it seems that greens constitute a siren call to begin cooking for Bo Bardi, incorporated in the places she marked out in bright crayon on an otherwise white plan. To spend time in the backyard, as the architect would have done with her husband and their guests, you have to pass through and interact with the kitchen; in the backyard, you are in the kitchen still. While one can imagine formal salon-style conversation playing out in the galleried living space at the front of the house, it’s easier to imagine music and laughter passing between the backyard and the kitchen late into the night.
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While not as prolific or lauded in her lifetime as Oscar Niemeyer, or her friend Lúcio Costa, Bo Bardi has been subsequently hailed for ‘the reciprocity in her work between the human and the built, the animate and inanimate’ – and this interrelationship is perhaps most evident in the kitchen and courtyard at the Casa de Vidro. As well as being an architect and academic, Bo Bardi was a magazine editor throughout much of her career; initially working at Domus, she eventually founded Habitat, the pre-eminent Brazilian architecture magazine, with her husband. It is the spirit of the curatorial magpie, so vital for a successful magazine editor, that I imagine to have been front and centre in home life at the Glass House, and therefore central in the kitchen too. Most images of the Glass House kitchen show a relatively sparse space with an imported stove, cooker and microwave oven, although the hooks on the walls and the shelf above the counters show collections of pots and pans and knick-knacks that hint at the collision of her minimal predilection with more utilitarian concerns. Bo Bardi designed every single thing in the space to work well to her needs; so too can be seen the traditional tools, art, crockery and other ephemera that the house was beautifully and carefully filled with by the end of her life.
It is well documented that Bo Bardi was a fine host, her house regularly filled with notable artists, architects and musicians from the flourishing bossa nova, art and film scenes in Brazil. Bo Bardi’s guests would sit around the dining table on Liberty-style chairs – often seen across the country in traditional homes. Designed by Lina as an architectural drawing board, the dining table’s marble top is supported on four metal legs locked in place by steel cables. During the day she would sit here with her colleagues, students or clients, architectural plans rolled out, her signature coloured crayons scattered where they have been pressed into service to adjust or adorn.
At night, eminent figures of the Brazilian artistic left, including Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil, would have been joined by international stars passing through São Paulo for pleasure as much as work – among them Gio Ponti, Alexander Calder and Roberto Rossellini. While talk might have started with lofty and cerebral ideas, it would no doubt turn to rallying ideological discussions in criticism of the military junta of the time, or the Vietnam war, or in celebration of Europe’s youth movements. Bo Bardi’s Brazil was a country open to ideas and modernisation and growth, while also being at the mercy of a tumultuous political landscape. Homes like Bo Bardi’s were important gathering places for like-minded artists and intellectuals, drawn from across the spectrum of academia and the creative arts. That said, music, film and art in Brazil at this time were joyful and radical in equal measure, and Bo Bardi and her public architecture – such as the São Paulo Museum of Art and the Solar do Unhão – were key catalysts for this creative rebellion. It would not be an enormous leap of the imagination to picture soirées at which Tropicalia and Musica Popular Brasileira were placed centre stage, their jaunty but politically powerful soundtrack lifting the mood, inspiring the cross-pollination of artistic ideas and sparking future collaborations, all framed by plenty of drink and delicious dinners.
Bo Bardi was alive to the socio-political moment in which she lived – equal parts explosive, exciting and disappointing – and this is evident in her writing, her architecture and her curation both at work and at home. The meals prepared in her kitchen would have been no different. She loved to cook, and while she had domestic staff (a slightly surprising fact given her political beliefs, but one that would have been expected and explained away by her being a successful working woman), it is known that she liked to be involved at least in the menu planning, if not always directly in the cooking. One can imagine her stovetop dotted with big pans of simmering feijoada, caruru and other Brazilian delicacies, steaming happily alongside Italian fare from her adolescence in Rome: perhaps oxtail, or cicoria braising in oil and garlic. Perhaps the smell of artichokes a la Romana would even have wafted in from the wood oven outside.
An avid collector and curator of curiosities, one imagines Bo Bardi’s meals to be a motley mix of recipes drawn from her experiences and travels. It is easy to picture the counters strewn with bowls from local craftspeople, holding piles of fruit and vegetables so abundant in Brazil, while one suspects there might also have been room for those plump cream-filled Roman maritozzi that are so hard to resist. As a cook, you don’t have to guess at how the space might be used. The turquoise pantry cupboards at one end will have held everything needed for creations local or exotic, the beautiful stove with its glass hood makes one want to stand over a simmering pot, and then the cicada call from the garden and the scent of burning wood would have you passing back and forth. One can imaging Calder rapping a beat with a spoon against the back of a newly published book, while Veloso and Gil, perhaps just back from political exile in London, improvise their sweet, soulful music; Caipirinhas are in hands, of course, and the loose structure of two men’s singing is perfectly reflecting the freeform curation of the meal, this home and all the life within it.
Lina Bo Bardi’s Casa de Vidro featured in the May 2010 issue of ‘The World of Interiors’. Learn about our subscription offers
