The faces of Janus: Modernism and hybridisation in the architecture of Lina Bo Bardi

From inside the echoing interior of a basketball court, large cut-out holes in the wall frame the convoluted, metropolitan landscape of Sao Paulo. From the outside, these holes look like hand-carved perforations in a rough and hollow concrete block. Lina Bo Bardi, the Italian-Brazilian architect, designed these unusual windows for the gymnasium of the SESC-Pompeia cultural and leisure centre between 1976 and 1982. These apertures are more than sills that control light and air (Figs 1, 2). They revive the etymological sense of the word janela, which means window in Portuguese.Like the two faces of Janus, they represent an ambivalent threshold. They exist between modern rationality and the spontaneity of everyday life and popular culture, merging where one begins and the other ends in Lina Bo Bardi's work. The window apertures exemplify the corollary of a long genealogy in the thinking and design of this unique architect, whose work defies easy classification. One of Lina Bo Bardi's major contributions to design was her focus on the cultural and anthropological character of architecture and her ability to hybridise modern and vernacular repertoires. She conceptualised this procedure as arquitetura pobre (simple architecture). Lina Bo Bardi's search for simplification and unpolished materials reflected her political and aesthetic interest in how Brazilian popular culture creatively dealt with the scarcity of material means. By doing so, she confronted privileged and disadvantaged social realities in Brazil. The development of this hybrid attitude came from her Italian experience, and can be seen in three major examples of her work spanning some twenty years: the Museum of Art of Sao Paulo, the Museum of Popular Art in Salvador, and the SESC-Pompeia. Her position as a woman and as a foreigner with easy access to the Brazilian architectural and cultural mainstream gave her a unique opportunity to realise her projects. Her dissonant voice cost her isolation for a long time until her work started to be valued in the 1980s. The spaces and buildings that Lina Bo Bardi designed look bare and sometimes even harsh. Yet, they manifest a deeply sensitive and intuitive approach that opened up the threshold between conflicting cultural spheres of modernisation in Brazil in the second part of the twentieth century.