PIETRO MARIA BARDI - THE VICARIOUS ARCHITECT: THE ... - FAU

1 5 th INTERNATIONAL PLANNING HISTORY SOCIETY CONFERENCE
PIETRO MARIA BARDI - THE VICARIOUS ARCHITECT:
THE IMPORTATION OF ITALIAN FUTURISM TO BRAZIL
ANNETTE CONDELLO, PhD
Department of Architecture and Interior Architecture,
School of the Built Environment, Curtin University, Perth, Australia
a.condello@curtin.edu.au
ABSTRACT
Italian-Brazilian Lina Bo Bardi’s modern architecture has received considerable
attention. Her urban projects in Brazil, however, are rarely discussed as having
been influenced by her husband’s thoughts. Consequently, they merit renewed
critical attention through this lens. Pietro Maria Bardi’s urban experiences and
architectural collaborations in pre-war Italy and Brazil informed his reflections
upon Italian Futurist manifestoes and drawings. His urban novellas, criticism of
Italy’s State Architecture and unrealized collaborations, specifically with Pier
Luigi Nervi on E’42 in Rome for Rationalist planner Marcello Piacentini, express
ways for considering the importation of the underlying Futurist design traits in
Brazil. This paper illuminates the lesser-known Italian Futurist links with Lina
Bo Bardi’s projects and tracks their origins to Pietro Maria Bardi. This
argument draws upon Olivia de Oliveira’s interview with Lina Bo Bardi, her
last. Pietro Maria Bardi was a vicarious architect and urban Futurist. He
subconsciously conceptualized designs with Lina Bo Bardi within an unrestricted
Futurist framework, imported from Italy and transformed in Brazil.
INTRODUCTION
How might one discuss the origins of Sao Paulo’s Futurist architectural
dimension? The Futurist aspirations found in Pietro Maria Bardi’s writings and
his collaborative works with Italian engineer Pier Luigi Nervi – the E’42’s
pavilions for Rationalist planner Marcello Piacentini in Rome offer points for
considering these insights into how Futurism impacted modern Brazilian
architecture. This was accomplished through his wife Lina Bo Bardi’s works.
“Despite or due to her experience of Fascism,” philosopher Eduardo Subarits
notes, she “believed in the urgency to reconsider that willingness of rupture
and renovation that had inspired European artists and intellectuals of the first
years of Italian Futurism.” 1 Lina Bo Bardi “experimented” with Italian Futurist
Antonio Sant’Elia’s “free forms,” 2 which is important as it demonstrates how
Pietro Maria Bardi might have inspired or collaborated with her on the San
Paulo museum design in the 1950s.
1 Eduardo Subarits, “Writing and cities,” in Cruelty and Utopia: Cities and Landscapes of
Latin America, New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2003, p.93.
2 My translation. Refer to Eduardo Subirats, “Lina Bo: ‘Un’epoca nuova e gia cominciata’”
in Antonella Gallo (ed.) Lina Bo Bardi Architetto, Venezia: Marsilio, 2004, p.27.

Cities, nations and regions in planning history
This paper argues how Pietro Maria Bardi’s urban aspirations unveiled Futurist
links in Italy. Then, it briefly explains how they permeated through certain
parts of Lina Bo Bardi’s architecture in the city of Sao Paulo. The Museum of Art
of São Paulo (MASP; 1957-68) and the Pompeia Leisure Centre (SESC-POMPEIA;
1977-86) are sites illustrating these links. These buildings are celebrated today
amongst architects for their blatancy and brusqueness rather than their
Futuristic ties.
Pietro Maria Bardi (1900-1999) had a tenuous affinity with the Futurists. He was
recognized as a prominent Italian curator, theorist of art and architecture in
Italy in the 1930s before his departure for Brazil, with Lina Bo, in 1946. He
knew the Futurist poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti as well as the Italian dictator
Benito Mussolini. 3 Bardi is lesser known for his urban-type novellas – for these
comprise of Futuristic elements.
The 1930s in particular struck an architectural/urban chord with Bardi. In 1933
he curated an Italian architecture exhibition in Buenos Aires, Argentina, with
another showing in Brazil. Then, he met an Italian journalist who was living in
Rio de Janeiro and whom invited him to visit Brazil again some other time. 4 In
1935, Bardi said that the definition of “Futurist architecture” followed after
Rationalism and he “campaign[ed] for an architecture that would directly
represent fascist politics [which] galvanized contemporary Italian architectural
publications.” 5 That same year he wrote a Futurist-type novella, La Strada e il
Violante (The Roadway and the Steering Wheel). This novella described his
inadvertent thoughts about Italian urbanism that related to Marinetti’s Futurists
Manifesto (1909), described in this paper.
Before leaving Italy, Lina Bo was exposed to Futurism on her own accord at an
exhibition in Rome, curated none other than by Pietro Maria Bardi himself. Lina
Bo (1914-1992) was an Italian architect and contributed designs, photomontages
and articles for magazines such as Habitat with Pietro Maria Bardi whom
possibly discussed Italian Futurist works. Much earlier at the age of 15, when
she was still an art student at the Liceo in Rome, Lina Bo’s peer Orestano (a
friend of Mussolini’s) organized an art show at the Galleria d’Arte di Roma,
curated by Pietro Maria Bardi. At the show, Bo recalls in a 1991 interview with
Olivia De Oliveira that Orestano’s son said to Lina:
“His excellency Marinetti, the capo del futurism, is to open the exhibition!” I
told him, “he’s not going to like it. It’s an absolute shamble.” I remember
Orestano presented his work, “Project for a Macaroni Factory”…What an idea!
He made the building tutto green, spinach-green, chiaro. So Marinetti opened
3 Terry Kirk described Benito Mussolini as a “Futurist-type agitator.” Terry Kirk, The
Architecture of Modern Italy. Volume 11: Visions of Utopia, 1900-Present, New York:
Princeton Architectural Press, 2005, p.53.
4 This was Lina Bo Bardi’s recollection stated in her last interview. Refer to Olivia de
Oliveira conducted the interview with Lina Bo Bardi on 27 th September 1991 in Sao Paulo.
See Olivia de Oliveira, “Interview with Lina Bo Bardi” in Lina Bo Bardi: Built Work, 2G,
no.23-24, 2003.
5 See David Rifkind, “Quadrante and the Politicization of Architectural Discourse in Fascist
Italy, “Doctorate dissertation, Columbia University, New York, 2007, pp.1,5.

1 5 th INTERNATIONAL PLANNING HISTORY SOCIETY CONFERENCE
the show and said, “Excellent! You’ve made a factory, with actual spinach
macaroni. It’s green!” 6
The significance of this event was a sort of architectural premonition for Lina
Bo Bardi. No doubt, Marinetti must have left a distinctive impression on her, a
Futurist one at that, to design “green” buildings in the form of reworking
abandoned factories in Sao Paulo in the future. A few years after this
impressive show, she studied architecture under the direction of Marcello
Piacentini at La Sapienza University in Rome, graduating in 1940. While she was
still a student, Bo worked with Piacentini on his E’42 project for Fascism’s new
capital city in Rome, gaining urban experience. 7 The preoccupation with
Futurism and Rationalist planning experience would have impacted her
architectural approach years later in Brazil since Pietro Maria Bardi was one of
the proponents of Rationalism in Italy.
Bo and Bardi had therefore met each other in a gallery in Marinetti’s presence.
From this point onwards, both Marinetti and Pietro Maria Bardi were to guide
her critical thinking and architecture. After the Bardis were married in Italy,
they visited Rio de Janeiro. 8 Fortunately, they remained in Brazil and later
became Brazilian citizens. In the process, they experimented with the free
architectural forms of Futurism, such as the MASP design in Sao Paulo.
ITALIAN FUTURISM AND PIETRO MARIA BARDI
At the turn of the twentieth century, an influx of Italian immigrants and visitors
sailed from the port of Naples to Brazil (as the Bardis did forty years later).
They soon began to change the city’s image from the Beaux-Arts traditions into
a sort of “subtropical” modern Rome. Italo-Russian architect Gregori
Warchavchik, for instance, had earlier worked with Italian Rationalist Marcello
Piacentini and then migrated from Rome to Sao Paulo in 1923. Pietro Maria
Bardi first visited Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro in 1933 to promote Italian
architecture and was well acquainted with Warchavchik and Piacentini. By
1935, the Brazilian government invited Piacentini, architect of the University of
Rome district, to visit Rio de Janeiro and advise them of a university project
there. 9 When Piacentini returned to Italy from Brazil, he entered a competition
- the E’42 (the universal exposition) project for Fascism’s new capital city in
6 Olivia de Oliveira conducted the interview with Lina Bo Bardi on 27 th September 1991 in
Sao Paulo. See Olivia de Oliveira, “Interview with Lina Bo Bardi” in Lina Bo Bardi: Built
Work, 2G, no.23-24, 2003, pp.234-235.
7 Olivia de Oliveira notes that Lina Bo Bardi worked on the E-42 competition with Marcello
Piacentini. This note is mentioned in a letter to Carlo Pagani from Lina Bo on 26 th
September 1939 in Pagani, Allegati alle considerazioni sul “Curriculum Letterario”;
personal archive of Carlo Pagani. Olivia de Oliveira, “Interview with Lina Bo Bardi” in Lina
Bo Bardi: Built Work, 2G, no.23-24, p.231 and see footnote 1.
8 There, the Bardis visited the Ministry of Health and Education (MES) building (1936-1943)
in Rio de Janeiro and the Copacabana Hotel, and staged two architectural exhibitions.
9 Refer to Emilio Faroldi and Maria Pilar Vettori, “Italia Brasile: Dialoghi di Architettura”
in Abitare, No.374, June 1998, p.58; and see Fraser, Valerie. Building the New World:
Studies in the Modern Architecture of Latin America 1930-1960, Verso, New York: 2000,
pp.200-201.

Cities, nations and regions in planning history
Rome (1938). 10 As noted earlier, both Pietro Maria Bardi and Lino Bo worked on
this exposition, separately.
Meanwhile, one of Sao Paulo’s main axes of the city, Paulista Avenue, had
transformed from a traditional to a modern hub. “Important changes to the
area also resulted from a master plan for Sao Paolo designed by the engineer
Prestes Maia (Plano de Avenidas, 1930), based on Daniel Burnham’s model for
Chicago.” 11 The city’s modern architecture and urban layout further changed
into a subtropical modern Rome first featuring Italian Rationalism and
thereafter by Italian Futurism through Pietro Bardi’s influence.
In Italy, Marinetti presented a new idea of Italian society “based on images of
modern cities, mechanized industries and new transport systems” 12 in 1909. He
announced that “a new era would be characterized by energy, speed, and
technological vision” in his Futurist manifesto. 13 Marinetti suggested that the
citizens of Italy should “destroy reactionary institutions like museums” and
instead “open the mysterious shutters of the impossible,” 14 in other words, an
“anti-museum.” By 1914, Marinetti collaborated with Antonio Sant’Elia who was
inspired by “American factories and skyscrapers” 15 and then created a series of
drawings of a visionary city called La Citta Nuova (The New City; fig.1). This
city featured vertical and horizontal skyscraper configurations in the form of
ribbons or massive bridges. Such configurations would inform Turin’s built
architecture.
10
Refer to Emilio Faroldi and Maria Pilar Vettori, “Italia Brasile: Dialoghi di
Architettura’”in Abitare, No.374, June 1998, p.58. Between 1938 and 1939, Piacentini
returned to Sao Paulo. During this time, he designed a lavishly appointed house for
Italian-Brazilian industrialist Francisco Matarazzo on Avenida Paulista.
11
Zeuler Lima, “Lessons from Sao Paolo,” p.30.
12
Donna Goodman, A History of the Future, New York: The Monacelli Press, 2008, p.55
13
Donna Goodman, A History of the Future, New York: The Monacelli Press, 2008, pp.55-
56.
14
Donna Goodman, A History of the Future, New York: The Monacelli Press, 2008, p.55.
15
Donna Goodman, A History of the Future, New York: The Monacelli Press, 2008, p.56.

1 5 th INTERNATIONAL PLANNING HISTORY SOCIETY CONFERENCE
Figure 1 – Detail of Antonio Sant’Elia’s open-air street of La Citta Nuova (1914). Esther da
Costa Meyer, The Work of Antonio Sant’Elia: Retreat into the Future, 1995, New Haven
and London: Yale University Press, 1995, p.105.

Cities, nations and regions in planning history
Figure 2 – Giacomo Matte-Trucco, FIAT factory roof test track (1914-1923), Turin, Terry
Kirk, The Architecture of Modern Italy. Volume 11: Visions of Utopia, 1900-Present, New
York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2005, p.60.
The same year Antonio Sant’Elia’s La Citta Nuova was created, an open-air
street was constructed on the roof of a horizontal skyscraper in Turin, a
renowned Italian Futurist design. Engineer Giacomo Matte-Trucco was
commissioned by Giovanni Agnelli to design the FIAT (the Factory of Italian
Automobiles of Turin) Lingotto plant, completed in 1923 (fig.2). Terry Kirk
considered Matte-Trucco’s elevated test track building as a Futurist urban
vision. 16 FIAT’s Futurist roof-scape exemplifies Sant’Elia’s open-air road in
reality.
The FIAT factory construction recalls a horizontal skyscraper found earlier in an
American utopian novel called Roadtown. Edgar Chambless’ Roadtown (1910)
outlines the linear city of the future to improve the well-being of citizens in the
vast landscape between major cities; all transportation would take place on the
roofs of the attached dwellings above. Chambless wrote:
Lay the modern skyscraper on its side and run the elevators and the pipes and
the wares horizontally instead of vertically… I would extend the blotch of
human habitations called cities out in radiating lines. I would surround the city
worker with the trees and grass and woods and meadows and the farmer with
all the advantages of city life – I had invented Roadtown. 17
16 Kirk, Terry, The Architecture of Modern Italy. Volume 11: Visions of Utopia, 1900-
Present, New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2005, pp.57-62.
17 Edgar Chambless, Chapter IV The Roadtown Plan of Construction in Roadtown, New
York: Roadtown Press, 1910, p.20.

1 5 th INTERNATIONAL PLANNING HISTORY SOCIETY CONFERENCE
Perhaps Matte-Trucco must have known about Roadtown because the owner of
the FIAT plant, Agnelli, had travelled to the Unites States to observe the
current architectural designs of automobile factories. And yet after its
completion, Le Corbusier visited the FIAT plant in 1925. 18 (For Le Corbusier,
“Lingotto was Europe’s most advanced factory building” and an “’American
factory,’ a talisman of European modernism.” 19 ) Four years after Le Corbusier’s
visit Pietro Maria Bardi wrote his first urban novella called The Life of the
Automobile where the driver is depicted as a type of “futuristic” being.
The FIAT factory was an important source for Pietro Maria Bardi as he was later
contracted by Agnelli to write another urban novella in 1935 to promote the
company. This novella was written after he had travelled to Brazil in 1933 and
assumedly his urban experiences in both Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo might
have influenced his architectural writings as well.
Critics, however, pay little attention to Bardi’s Futurist-type novellas produced
at the beginning of his architectural/urban career (apart from Jefferey T.
Schnapp). According to Schnapp, Bardi published The Life of the Automobile
(1929) and La Strada e il Violante (The Roadway and the Steering Wheel; 1935).
In the latter novella in particular, Schnapps suggests how Matte-Trucco’s FIAT’s
Lingotto factory is hinted in the text, especially with its rooftop raceway. The
Roadway and the Steering Wheel was in fact “published under direct FIAT
sponsorship,” 20 and as the title suggests, it takes cues from Chambless’ utopian
novel. The urban nature of Bardi’s writing reveals his fervour for fusing Futurist
aspirations of roadways with architecture. Bardi wrote:
Along the ribbons that tie together our cities, that traverse the
countryside, that cross our mountains, they represent a presence that we can
no longer dissociate from the land itself: the Revolution as a permanent
uniform, as founding fact of our nation’s life. 21
Here one can see the deliberately urban nature of the Futurist-type text – the
would-be bituminous bands connect from one city to the next through the open
landscape. Moreover, Bardi’s text is somewhat similar in style to Marinetti’s
18 Fernando Perez Oyarzun, “Le Corbusier in South America: Reinventing the South
American City,” in Le Corbusier and the Architecture of Reinvention, London:
Architectural Association, 2003, pp.146-148, 153. And see Terry Kirk, The Architecture of
Modern Italy. Volume 11: Visions of Utopia, 1900-Present, New York: Princeton
Architectural Press, 2005, p.61.
19 Terry Kirk, The Architecture of Modern Italy. Volume 11: Visions of Utopia, 1900-
Present, New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2005, pp.61-62. Roadtown most
certainly would have inspired Le Corbusier’s sketch for a master plan for Rio de Janeiro
(1929). The sketch expressed as an exaggeration of the open-air Futurist condition.
Through his drawings of continuous bands of multi-storey buildings as road bridges, they
are depicted as suffering the impacts of humidity, connecting the languid landscape to
the spry sugar loaf mountain in the distance. Valerie Fraser noted the sketch was “a pathbreaking
building,” Valerie Fraser, Building the New World: Studies in the Modern
Architecture of Latin America 1930-1960, Verso, New York: 2000, p.152.
20 Jeffrey T. Schnapp, “Driven,” in Qui Parle, Vol.13, No.1 (Fall/Winter 2001), p.142.
21 Pietro Maria Bardi quoted in Jeffrey T. Schnapp, “Driven,” in Qui Parle, Vol.13, No.1
(Fall/Winter 2001), p.147.

Cities, nations and regions in planning history
manifesto of Futurism, but only in terms of the absence of human habitation of
the open spaces:
We shall sing the great crowds excited by work, by pleasure, and by unrest.
We shall sing the multi-colored polyphonic tides of revolution in the modern
capitals […with] factories hung on clouds by the crooked lines of their smoke,
bridges that stride the rivers like gymnasts […and] adventurous steamers that
sniff the horizon. 22
Bardi possibly acted as an urban designer in some respects as his text
demonstrates the thrill of urbane architecture and speed. For Schnapp, Bardi
“functioned as a ‘fellow traveller’ of the second and third generation Futurists,
yet his longstanding conviction that Futurism was already of the past was
shared by the majority of Italian exponents of modernism.” 23 The 1935 novella,
and its similarity to Marinetti’s style, provides evidence of Bardi’s contribution
as an architect and as a latent Futurist.
Linking the visionary work between Pietro Maria Bardi and Sant’Elia, David
Rifkind links argues that Bardi was the first Italian critic to chart architecture’s
philosophical role. Together with Massimo Bontempelli, Bardi co-founded the
cultural journal Quadrante in 1933. 24 Their aim was to “construct an
environment in which modern architecture could flourish in Italy.” 25 Before
Bardi, Rifkind continues, there was one critic who discussed the problem of a
“state architecture” in a 1929 essay by Fillia (or Luigi Colombo, leader of the
Turinese Futurist group). Fillia made suggestions about Italian Futurism.
Referring to Sant’Elia, Rifkind notes that Filia “wanted [the Futurists] to remain
uniquely Italian, balancing lyricism and rationality while expressing the passion
of our race and the luminosity of our land.” 26 Three years before Filia’s essay
was written Bardi owned the Galleria Bardi in Milan (1926), where architectural
exhibitions were held. 27 And stifled by Filia’s nationalist tone to his thoughts on
Sant’Elia and the staid and traditional gallery venue, it is probable that Bardi
was ready to leave Italy and promote a new strain of Italian Rationalism
elsewhere, by venturing to other countries in 1932, such as Russia and Brazil –
the places Marinetti visited as well. Fillia must have triggered one of Pietro
Maria Bardi’s thoughts to build up the idea of an “anti-gallery” for Brazil.
Critiquing the state of Italian architecture in the early 1930s, Bardi referred to
Sant’Elia’s works, whose projects were exhibited in Roman galleries, and
22 th
Marinetti’s manifesto, 20 February, 1909, quoted in Terry Kirk, The Architecture of
Modern Italy. Volume 11: Visions of Utopia, 1900-Present, New York: Princeton
Architectural Press, 2005, p.51
23
Jeffrey T. Schnapp, “Driven,” in Qui Parle, Vol.13, No.1 (Fall/Winter 2001), footnote
10.
24
David Rifkind, The Battle of Modernism: Quandrante and the Politicization of
Architectural Discourse in Fascist Italy, Venice: Marsilio, 2012, pp.11-12.
25
David Rifkind, The Battle of Modernism: Quandrante and the Politicization of
Architectural Discourse in Fascist Italy, Venice: Marsilio, 2012, p.17.
26
David Rifkind, The Battle of Modernism: Quandrante and the Politicization of
Architectural Discourse in Fascist Italy, Venice: Marsilio, 2012, p.38.
27
Bardi also owned another one, the Galleria d’Arte di Roma in 1930. David Rifkind, The
Battle of Modernism: Quandrante and the Politicization of Architectural Discourse in
Fascist Italy, Venice: Marsilio, 2012, p.16.

1 5 th INTERNATIONAL PLANNING HISTORY SOCIETY CONFERENCE
sponsored by Mussolini, alongside other major modern architects in Europe.
Sant’Elia’s designs dealt with “the traffic problems of modern cities” 28 and this
urban problem prompted Bardi with new sensibilities in formulating
Rationalism. He praised Antonio Sant’Elia’s Futurist Cittā Nuova. 29 Yet for Bardi,
“Rationalists accused the Futurists of being scenographers whose lyricism
functioned well on paper but could not be translated into architecture.” 30
Sant’Elia’s projects made Pietro Maria Bardi rethink the public spaces of large
buildings to accommodate for large crowds.
Nevertheless, when Pietro Maria Bardi published “Architettura. Arte di stato,”
which was addressed to Mussolini, he “chose not to share publicly his fellow
Rationalists’ disdain for the Futurists.” 31 It appears as though Bardi rethought
about the architectural discrepancies between Futurism and Rationalism and
the only way he could begin express this, architecturally, was to collaborate
with Nervi on the E’42 pavilions. In 1938, Pietro Maria Bardi worked together
with Nervi on the Pavilion Type B project and then in 1939 the Pavilion of
Italian Culture. 32 Additionally, the Quadrante journal published a range of
visionary projects Nervi and collaborative projects for Rome’s E’42. 33
(Intriguingly, some of Nervi’s projects are Rational and yet quasi-“Sant’Elian.”)
Overall, Marinetti was subconsciously instrumental on Pietro Maria Bardi’s work.
Pietro Maria Bardi’s urban-type novellas, his criticism about Sant’Elia’s work
and architectural collaborations with Nervi reinforce this argument; he acted as
a vicarious architect and urban Futurist. The visionary collaborative projects for
Rome’s E’42 are therefore significant in the Futuristic sense; Lina Bo worked
with Piacentini and Pietro Maria Bardi worked with Nervi. Although overt
Futuristic forms were not evident in the plans, visually, they did begin to
pervade later in the Brazilian projects in the form of interior elevations.
FUTURISM IN BRAZIL
Returning to Pietro Maria Bardi’s 1933 trip to South America, however,
“Futurism was at once everywhere and nowhere on the South American
scene.” 34 When Marinetti visited Sao Paulo in 1926 (and later in 1936), he tried
28
Donna Goodman, A History of the Future, New York: The Monacelli Press, 2008, p.57.
29
Esther da Costa Meyer 191 Esther da Costa Meyer, The Work of Antonio Sant’Elia:
Retreat into the Future, 1995, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995,
p.191.
30
Esther da Costa Meyer 191 Esther da Costa Meyer, The Work of Antonio Sant’Elia:
Retreat into the Future, 1995, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995,
p.194.
31
David Rifkind, The Battle of Modernism: Quandrante and the Politicization of
Architectural Discourse in Fascist Italy, Venice: Marsilio, 2012, p.41.
32
See Olmo and Chiorino, eds. Pier Luigi Nervi: Architecture as Challenge, Milano: Silvana
Editoriale, 2010.
33
David Rifkind, The Battle of Modernism: Quandrante and the Politicization of
Architectural Discourse in Fascist Italy, Venice: Marsilio, 2012, p.19.
34
Schnapp, Jeffrey T. and de Castro Rocha, Jao Cezar, “Brazilian Velocities: on
Marinetti’s 1926 trip to South America,” South Central Review, Vol.13, no.2/3 (Summer,
Autumn, 1996), 106.

Cities, nations and regions in planning history
to indoctrinate Brazilians with his Futurist writings since his ideas in Italy had
provided one way to tackle poverty and unemployment amongst the working
class. 35 Cultural historians Schnapp and Jao Cezar de Castro Rocha summarize
Marinetti’s Brazilian experience:
Disembarking in Brazil imagined himself entering an ideal world – a Futurist
paradise combining raucous publicity, and industrial noise, a paradise inhabited
by friends and fellow travellers such that the coupling of poet and bay finds its
immediate counterpart in the “affectionate” encounter between Italian
Futurism and South American Futurism. 36
Marinetti thought he would expose his Futurist Manifesto in Brazil with huge
success. Though his vision did not prove to be so grand, Italian Futurism at that
time was considered “absurd” amongst Paulista art and literary circles because
it seemed backward to them. 37
Twenty years later, when the Bardi’s were living in Sao Paulo, they were able
to combine their talents and commence their Futurist endeavour as a couple.
In Sao Paulo, Pietro Maria Bardi met with the entrepreneur Assis Chateaubriand
and proposed a new museum of contemporary art. Like Marinetti, Bardi must
have assumed that Sao Paulo would be a Futurist mecca for Italian architects.
When the Bardi’s were settled in Sao Paulo, they invited Nervi to “spend a few
weeks” with them and asked him to present talks on his concrete structures. 38
Then, Nervi was Lina Bo Bardi’s engineering consultant for the São Paolo Art
Museum (MASP). Prior to the MASP construction, Nervi and his son Antonio
collaborated with Bo Bardi on the Taba Guaianazes complex (1954). 39 Although
the multi-storey project was unrealized, it prompted the Bardis to observe
other Latin American structures then under construction, for instance, the
building of Brasilia. Lucio Costa’s Sant’Elian-type Bus Station in Brasilia (1957)
could also be categorised under the rubric of Brazilian Futurist links along with
the Bardis and Nervi’s collaborations. So one of the first true exponents of
Brazilian Futurism that adapted urban scenarios deriving from Marinetti’s
manifesto into architecture was Lina Bo Bardi via her husband’s influence.
35 Jeffrey T. Schnapp and Jao Cezar de Castro Rocha, “Brazilian Velocities: on Marinetti’s
1926 trip to South America,” South Central Review, Vol.13, no.2/3 (Summer, Autumn,
1996), 119.
36 Schnapp, Jeffrey T. and de Castro Rocha, Jao Cezar, “Brazilian Velocities: on
Marinetti’s 1926 trip to South America,” South Central Review, Vol.13, no.2/3 (Summer,
Autumn, 1996), 135.
37 Pietro Maria Bardi, New Brazilian Art, New York: Praeger Publishers, 1970, pp.22-23.
38 Zeuler Lima, “Nelson A. Rockerfeller and Art Patronage in Brazil after World War II:
Assis Chateaubriand,” The Museu de Arte Moderna (MAM), the Rockerfeller Archive
Centre-Research Report, 2010. Thank you to Zeuler Lima for granting me permission to
use this report.
39 Refer to Lina Bo Bardi, “Taba Guaianases,” in Habitat, No.14, January-February, 1954:
4-10. Thank you to Zeuler Lima for providing me with this source. As a latent Futuristtype
building, the Taba Guaianases, project later inspired Nervi’s collaboration with Gio
Ponti on the Pirelli Tower design in Milan.

1 5 th INTERNATIONAL PLANNING HISTORY SOCIETY CONFERENCE
INSTANCES OF FUTURISM IN LINA BO BARDI’S WORKS
As a result of this paper’s argument about Pietro Maria Bardi as a vicarious
architect, Sant’Elia and Marinetti’s ideas were only implemented in Brazilian
architecture from the early 1940s onwards. In the case of Sao Paulo’s
architecture, Futurism was imported directly from Italy and its architecture
evolved further via its tropical context, allowing the scale of buildings to
expand into two scenarios, horizontally and vertically.
It is possible that Pietro Maria Bardi subconsciously paved the way for a future
architectural vision for the city of Sao Paolo, to create the idea of the MASP
building as a horizontal “anti-museum.” 40 Lina Bo Bardi’s design of MASP’s
picture gallery was also informed by Nervi’s structures in Italy.
MASP’s Futurist scenario is created by the large public space beneath the
massive trusses emerging from two pools of water where crowds can congregate
– an open-air Marinetti-type of theatre for the masses underneath the floating
plinth. For Carlos Eduardo Comas, the “perforated pleated slab” is in fact based
on Nervi’s Turin Motor Show, Hall B (1948-50). 41 The “anti-museum” metaphor
would then be open to the possibility of key links to urbanism since it was to be
transparent or in the words of Lina Bo Bardi a “greenhouse,” 42 because of its
Trianon Park surroundings (fig.3). The “anti-museum” was one type of Futurist
building realized in Brazil: through the building’s transparency and horizontal
skyscraper configuration. It imported parts of Turin’s FIAT factory and Motor
Show (Hall B), specifically the road test roof-scape, and the elevated open-air
street sections deriving from Sant’Elia’s New City.
Marinetti’s text possibly informed the SESC-POMPEIA’s Futurist scenario.
Marinetti’s lines - the “crooked lines of smoke” - have been integrated into Lina
Bo Bardi’s main structure by connecting the seven elevated catwalks to the
tower (fig.4). In addition, “bridges that stride the rivers like gymnasts” – here
she designed the towers to house a gymnasium. Perhaps she might have also
been thinking about Pietro Maria Bardi’s text from The Roadway and the
Steering Wheel – by building the “traversing ribbons” between the new parts of
the construction. The Y or U-shaped bridges are even reminiscent of Nervi’s
structures laid out horizontally.
As far as her Pompeia trademark design is concerned, Lina Bo Bardi replaced
the plumes of smoke with flowers billowing out of the chimney. This trademark
emphasizes the importance of the effect that Marinetti had on her from an
early age in Rome, noted at the beginning of this paper. Furthermore,
Marinetti’s remark about the “green factory” was realized when she designed
the rough and greenish tinge to the Chame-Chame House (1958-1964) built in
40 Curiously, Olivia de Oliveira uses “an anti-museum,” or a museum beyond bounds” as a
title in a section of her book. See Olivia de Oliveira, Olivia. Subtle Substances: The
Architecture of Lina Bo Bardi, Barcelona: Gustav Gili and Romana Guerra Editora Ltda,
2006, p.275
41 See Carlos Eduardo Comas, “Lina 3 x 2,” ARQTEXTO, 14, 2009, 152.
42 See Olivia de Oliveira, Olivia. Subtle Substances: The Architecture of Lina Bo Bardi,
Barcelona: Gustav Gili and Romana Guerra Editora Ltda, 2006, p.266.

Cities, nations and regions in planning history
Salvador, now demolished. Marinetti’s remark would later inspire architects
today concerned with the issue of architecture and sustainability.
Figure 3 – Lina Bo Bardi’s preliminary urban plan of MASP, Sao Paulo in Antonella Gallo
(ed.) Lina Bo Bardi Architetto, Venezia: Marsilio, 2004, p.108.
Figure 4 – Lina Bo Bardi’s aquarelle of SESC Pompeia’s possible future (1983), San Paulo in
Antonella Gallo (ed.) Lina Bo Bardi Architetto, Venezia: Marsilio, 2004, p.53.

1 5 th INTERNATIONAL PLANNING HISTORY SOCIETY CONFERENCE
CONCLUSION
For the Bardis, Brazil became a sort of “Futurist resort,” a place where they
could localize free forms emanating from Italy: to release Matte-Trucco’s FIAT
factory from its industrial landscape and shake off Marinetti’s manacles.
Subsequently, Pietro Maria Bardi promoted and published the works of Brazilian
artists, architects and landscape architects internationally, such as The Tropical
Gardens of Burle Marx (1964) and New Brazilian Art (1970). Back in Italy he
published Viaggo nell’architettura (1971). New Brazilian Art in particular not
only published art but “Brasilia and the new architecture” and also featured
Lina Bo’s MASP Building. Within the latter book there is one image worth
mentioning as it pinpoints the absurdity of Paulista Futurism, a look at the 1922
Art Exhibition held in the city, which, at the time, was a backlash against
Italian Futurist art. At the Trianon Park club (or Clube dos Artistas e Amigos da
Arte), the place where the Bardi’s use to socialise in San Paulo in 1950 and
before the MASP building was conceived, Lina Bo Bardi organised a ball entitled
“Outskirts.” She probably borrowed the title from Boccioni’s street-painting
series of Milan, for example, States of Mind. In any case, Pietro Maria Bardi
describes the club’s interior as a salvage yard:
“Décor consisted of all the staple commodities of the rubbish dump: empty
cans, twisted metal, rusty tins, scrap-metal, broken dolls, broken bottles, rags,
dilapidated objects, rotten rope, and rusty wire-a veritable example of trash
bin aesthetics.” 43
Lina Bo Bardi was indeed ahead of her time and her aesthetic sensibilities were
somewhat similar to the Surrealist/Mexican architect Juan O’Gorman. As a
result of Pietro Maria Bardi’s publications and architectural collaborations, he
most certainly influenced his wife’s career in Brazil. He did this by exposing her
architecture internationally. As Subirats has asserted, the city of Sao Paulo
comprises a “heavy Futurist dimension” because it comprises “the unavoidable
presence of ruins and industrial waste.” 44 Since the city has risen, and as it
continues to rise, the Bardis laid the architectural foundations for Futurism to
develop: into something that can be salvaged, rustic-Futuristic.
43
Pietro Maria Bardi, New Brazilian Art, New York, Washington and London: Praeger
Publishers, 1970, p.86.
44
Quoted in Richard J Williams, Brazil, London: Reaktion books 2009, p.196. Eduardo
Subirats, “Arquitetura e Poesia: Dois Exemplos Latino-Americano,” Projecto, 143 (July
1991), pp.75-9.

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