Lina Bo Bardi (1914–1992) was an Italian-born Brazilian modernist architect and designer who devoted her working life to the social and cultural potential of architecture. Born in Rome, she graduated in architecture there in 1939, worked in Milan with Carlo Pagani and Gio Ponti. In 1946 she married the critic Pietro Maria Bardi and moved with him to Brazil, where they founded the magazine Habitat and he set up the São Paulo Museum of Art. Drawn to Brazilian vernacular design, she found acceptance hard as both a foreigner and a woman. In 2021 the Venice Biennale gave her a posthumous Special Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement.
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Her first built work was her own Casa de Vidro (1951), a glass house in the remnants of the Atlantic rainforest in Morumbi, São Paulo. In Salvador she turned a 17th-century sugar mill into the museum of the Solar do Unhão (1963). MASP (1968), the São Paulo Museum of Art, lifts its galleries in a box spanning 74 metres on four red concrete columns. SESC Pompéia (1986) converts a factory into a leisure centre, with two concrete sports towers joined by walkways.
