Casa de Vidro: Lina Bo Bardi's House in the Canopy

In 1951, the same year she was naturalised as a Brazilian citizen, Lina Bo Bardi completed her first built work. The Casa de Vidro, the Glass House, stands on a hilltop in Morumbi, then a former tea farm on the edge of remnant Atlantic rainforest, and was the first, or among the first three, residences built in what would become Sao Paulo's byword for an exclusive modernist suburb set in tropical nature. Bo Bardi had arrived from war-devastated Italy five years earlier with her husband, and the house is routinely read as her declaration of optimism and renewal. She had written that in postwar Europe man's house was now rubble. In Brazil, she built one back up.

Not a house set on an open lawn, but a house lifted into the rainforest canopy.

Bo Bardi was born Achillina Bo in Rome in 1914 and became an Italian-Brazilian architect, a hyphenation the house embodies. She arrived in Brazil in 1946, and the Casa de Vidro, completed in 1951, the year of her naturalisation, belongs to the first chapter of her Brazilian life. It was her first built work, which gives it a particular charge: everything she would later do at civic scale begins here as a domestic experiment.

The clients were the architect herself and her husband Pietro Maria Bardi, the art critic, writer, and founder-director of the Museu de Arte de Sao Paulo, whom she had married in 1945 and followed from Italy to Brazil in 1946. The house was designed in 1949 to 1950 and built between 1949 or 1950 and 1951; one academic source dates completion to 1952, but the consensus in published sources is 1951.

A house in two halves

The structure is disarmingly simple: two thin slabs of reinforced concrete, forming floor and roof, carried on slender steel pilotis. Glass curtain walls enclose the social areas, and the main living area is almost completely open. An internal courtyard is pierced through the slabs, with a tree growing up through the heart of the house. Bo Bardi positioned the house around the existing tree and let the garden grow up into the architecture; the tree is not a later accident but part of the design. Turquoise-blue glass mosaic flooring reinforces the sense of lightness. The principal access is from underneath the elevated volume, by an open stair rising into the expansive glass-walled living area. The entrance is marked by a mosaic by the artist Enrico Galassi with a De Chirico motif.

The house is a deliberate hybrid. The social half is transparent, lifted on pilotis so the landscape flows beneath it; the private and service half is opaque and rooted in the ground, described as having a Mediterranean language. The split prefigures the tension between modernity and tradition that runs through all of Bo Bardi's later work, from MASP, built between 1957 and 1968, to the SESC Fabrica da Pompeia of 1977.

The hybrid is worth dwelling on. The transparent social half, lifted on pilotis with the landscape flowing beneath, speaks the international language of modernism; the opaque private half, rooted in the ground, speaks what the research describes as a Mediterranean language, the language of walls, courtyards, and enclosure. Most architects of the period chose one. Bo Bardi built both and joined them, and the join is the argument: modernity did not have to mean amnesia.

The house was built contemporaneously with Philip Johnson's Glass House of 1949 and Mies van der Rohe's Farnsworth House of 1945 to 1951. It shares the glass-box language, but its answer is specifically Brazilian: Not a house set on an open lawn, but a house lifted into the rainforest canopy. Bo Bardi planted the trees herself, on a seven-thousand-square-metre lot, so they would grow within and around the architecture.

The lot itself was a former tea farm on a hilltop, seven thousand square metres of remnant Mata Atlantica, Atlantic rainforest. The house was the first, or among the first three, residences built in Morumbi, and Bo Bardi's decision to plant the trees herself, to let the garden grow up into the architecture, reads now as an early statement of an attitude she never abandoned: that building and landscape are one project. The turquoise-blue glass mosaic flooring, reinforcing the sense of lightness, and the Galassi mosaic with its De Chirico motif at the entrance, are the decorative register of the same idea: a European memory, restated in Brazilian materials and light.

Forty years as a salon, then a museum

The Casa de Vidro was the Bardis' private residence for about forty years, and a meeting place for artists and intellectuals in mid-century Sao Paulo. The site includes a tropical garden with the atelier, garage, and caretaker's house. After the deaths of Lina in 1992 and Pietro Maria Bardi, the house became the home of the Instituto Lina Bo e P.M. Bardi, which cares for the architect's archive and art collection.

Following extensive renovation, the house reopened to the public in 2013 and is visitable by guided tour. Unlike most architects' house museums, the interior survives with the Bardis' eclectic furniture, found objects, and artworks largely as they left them, and visitors consistently note how close the experience is to walking through the rooms as lived in. The Instituto is working to open all of the house's spaces, including the garden structures. In 2016 and 2017 the Getty Foundation's Keeping It Modern programme funded a conservation and management plan for the house, developed with the Instituto de Arquitetura e Urbanismo of the University of Sao Paulo and the University of Ferrara. The Graham Foundation funded the first in-depth publication dedicated to the house, Casa de Vidro: The Bardis' Life between Art, Architecture and Landscape, presenting unpublished material and the building's full history and transformation. In May and June 2023 the Italian fashion house Bottega Veneta staged The Square Sao Paulo, a travelling cultural programme, inside the house.

The conservation history is part of the story. The Getty Foundation's Keeping It Modern programme funded a conservation and management plan in 2016 and 2017, developed with the University of Sao Paulo and the University of Ferrara, treating the house with the seriousness of a major monument. The Graham Foundation's publication gave it its first in-depth scholarly record. And the Instituto's ongoing work to open all of the house's spaces, including the garden structures, means the museum is still becoming what it will be.

More than the house survives. The tropical garden holds the atelier, the garage, and the caretaker's house, and the Instituto is working to open all of the site's spaces, including these garden structures. What distinguishes the museum is the state of the interior: the Bardis' eclectic furniture, found objects, and artworks survive largely as they left them, so the guided tour comes as close as a museum can to walking through rooms as lived in. Forty years of private life are still legible in the arrangement of things.

In May and June 2023 the Italian fashion house Bottega Veneta staged The Square Sao Paulo, a travelling cultural programme, inside the house. It was a sign of the building's continuing life as a cultural venue rather than a sealed relic.

Standing

The house is listed as historical heritage of the State of Sao Paulo by CONDEPHAAT, resolution of 19 January 1987. It is not on the UNESCO World Heritage List. It is considered one of the masterpieces of Brazilian and Latin American modern architecture, and a precursor to Bo Bardi's larger civic works.

The enduring image is the tree through the courtyard, the house built around a living thing rather than clearing it away. Optimism, in this case, had a structural logic.

The house's listed status, as historical heritage of the State of Sao Paulo under the 1987 CONDEPHAAT resolution, secures it. But its real protection is its clarity. Decades on, the proposition still reads: a house need not conquer its site. It can be lifted into the canopy and let the forest do the rest.