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organism suitable for living' which incorporated everydayness and the energy of the
people who use it" (Oliveira 2009). Consequently she explained her architecture by
means of the word 'substances' rather than 'materials'. These substances are air, light,
nature and art, plus time itself, according to Oliveira.
In her writings about Glass House, Lina Bo, makes it clear that her work, did not pursue
neither decorative nor compositional effects, since their main goal was an "extreme
approach to nature, by all means, the simplest one, which could have less impact on
nature." (Grinover and Rubino 2009). For her, the problem was the creation of a
"physically protected" environment, so that one could live sheltered from rain and wind,
while at the same time participating in the idea that architecture can be, at once, "poetic
and ethical, even in a storm" (Grinover and Rubino 2009).
In the year 1951, now a naturalized Brazilian, Lina built a residence for the Bardi couple,
“Glass House”. It was one of the first houses built in the Morumbi neighbourhood and
was constructed on a plot of 7,000 m
2
. Initially the house appeared hostile towards the
hill on which it suddenly found itself, as shown in Figure 1a. However, gradually cradled
by the local vegetation, its residents could now look through the forest and plantations
above the periphery of the city of São Paulo (Figure 1b). Both images were extracted
from Oliveira (Oliveira, 2009).Today this external area has become a small protected
place full of rare plant species. "Glass House" also hosts the Lina Bo and Pietro Maria
Bardi Institute, founded in 1990 to disseminate and promote culture and arts in Brazil
and abroad (Van Gameren, 2000).
a b
Figure 1: The “Glass House”, recently completed (1951), in Morumbi, Sao Paulo (a) and fifty years
after construction (b). Images were extracted from Oliveira (Oliveira 2009).
The first pictures of the site allow us to observe their columns seemingly too thin to
sustain such delicate balance. The glass skin that surrounds the entire residence
exposes the interior of the house to the outside inasmuch as it also allows the eyes to
penetrate within. Fifty years after its construction, it is now perfectly integrated into its
setting. An opening in the middle of the room hosts a tree (Figure 2) that is covered with
epiphytic plants and flowers, and creates one of the few places where the ground is
illuminated by sunlight. The photographs presented in Figure 3 shows Lina on the stairs
of the house (a) and in front of the "glass wall", of a room nicknamed “São Paulo Hall”
(b), of Glass House in 1952. The second exposure (b) is a photo by Fernando
Albuquerque. Both images were extracted from Oliveira (Oliveira 2009).
