Bowl: a Chair for Freedom

Bowl: A Chair for Freedom

By Adélia Borges

Six decades ago, chairs would rigidly dictate the way people should sit on them. Users had just one option: to sit up straight. The 1951 Bowl Chair arrived to shake up this scene. Man no longer obeyed the object; now the object would obey man, according to their movements and desires. Far from limiting or constraining users, it would free them.

Freedom is a key word in the ideas and trajectory of the chair’s creator, Lina Bo Bardi, and an everyday practice in her plural activities. In all the dimensions of her work, more than technique or aesthetics, she was interested in serving human beings. ‘True architecture is a total process, embracing human beings’ economic, political and social relationships,’ Lina wrote. ‘Surely beauty, a beautiful form, is capable of consoling man. Poetry in form is vital. However, without architecture’s social sense, all of this gets lost. Man is the ultimate objective of architecture.’

The Bowl Chair illustrates this enunciation perfectly. The poetry in its essential form comes to the forefront at first sight. It can be summed up as a shell deposited on a tubular frame. These two pieces are loose, superimposed without any means of fixation. ‘What is new in this piece of furniture, what is absolutely new, is the fact that the chair can achieve movement from all sides, with no mechanic means whatsoever, only due to its spherical form. There are no other pieces of furniture of this kind,’ Lina wrote about her Bowl Chair.

Innovation was evident, so much so the chair was featured in a cover story in the renowned American magazine Interiors in November 1953, sixty years ago – a notable feat, considering Brazil was, at that time, regarded as a peripheral country in the design arena, with its creations usually destined to invisibility, the opposite of what was happening in centers of power such as New York, London, or Milan.

With the title Inventions in Furniture, the text on Interiors emphasized particularly the fact that users ‘can change posture and reclining angle so easily,’ mentioning ‘the humor and resourcefulness of the designer.’ And it added: ‘It is the designer herself who dramatizes the versatility of her semi-spherical chair by a change from casual to formal costume. The bowl’s tilt responds to light downward pressure of hand or thigh. Its light weight makes it easy to lift from the frame for almost horizontal off-floor lolling.’

In the photo-essay mentioned by the magazine, Lina was captured in different positions, with her legs hanging or retracted. In an article published by Brazilian magazine Habitat, she wrote captions to these images enunciating functions for the chair: of reading, of thinking, of lying down, of sleeping, of nesting – curiously, she does not mention its obvious use, the function of sitting down, probably because Lina was everything but obvious or predictable in her trajectory.

Thus, she makes clear that, beyond formal refinement or technical innovation inherent to the object, her intention through her direct design was flexibility, offering a great variety of positions in order to fulfill a great variety of needs and wishes. Human beings should be in the center of everything.

At 37, when she designed the Bowl Chair, Lina had been in Brazil for only five years. She had come to the country in 1946, leaving behind the post-war era in Italy. Chair designs were not strange to her history: there are references of a seat designed by her in the Bo and Pagano studio, while she still lived in Milan. In that Italian city, where she lived from 1939 to 1945, first working in her own studio and later with Gio Ponti, she had created product designs, graphic designs, set decorations, illustrations, exhibitions, press articles, etc. – what she had not done was architecture per se, as Italy in the early 40s ‘was marked by destruction rather than construction.’

In Brazil, a country where everything was yet to be done, she kept on her plural activities and added new challenges to them. As early as 1947, she designed an adaptation to a building so it could house Museu de Arte de São Paulo, directed by her husband, Pietro Maria Bardi. That was where she developed her first Brazilian piece of furniture, a wood and leather folding chair for the Museum’s auditory.

In 1948, revealing her fascination with this typology of objects, she organized the A cadeira [The Chair] exhibition at Museu de Arte de São Paulo. From 1948 to 1951, she maintained the Studio de Arte e Arquitetura Palma with architect Giancarlo Palanti, dedicated to manufacturing furniture. ‘My starting point was structural simplicity, taking advantage of the extraordinary veins and dyes of Brazilian woods as well as their degree of resistance and capacity,’ allied to cheap cotton fabrics and leather.

The Bowl Chair was designed when the partnership with Palanti was broken and she was excited about being finally able to build her first architecture work, the now renowned Casa de Vidro [Glass House], her home. There is no evidence that she might have designed the Bowl Chair specifically for Casa de Vidro. According to architect Marcelo Ferraz, who contributed with her and studied her history, there are indications that this design was aimed at being a commercially successful piece, produced in industrial scale for a wide market.

The Situation in Brazil

Development in Brazil at that time certainly fed Lina’s and other designers’ dreams regarding the role of design in building the country’s industrial future within the process of modernity. Economy was growing with budding industrialization. Urbanization was speeding up. Democratic airs were being breathed after a regime ended in 1947. In 1950, the first television transmission happened in the country. Cultural life in large cities was booming. In 1951, the first Bienal de Arte de São Paulo took place.

Architecture had a key role in building a country aspiring to be new, to be a ‘country of the future.’ The basis for modern architecture had been launched in 1925, in a manifest signed by Gregori Warchavchik, a Russian architect who had moved to Brazil and who was designing buildings and furniture in São Paulo. In 1943, Oscar Niemeyer’s seminal work

Arper SPA Instituto Lina Bo e P.M. Bardi T +39 0422 7918 Via Lombardia 16 Rua General Almério de Moura, 200 F +39 0422 791800 31050 Monastier di Treviso (TV), Italy 05690-080-São Paulo (SP), Brasil [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] www.bardisbowlchair.arper.com www.arper.com www.institutobardi.com.br Complexo da Pampulha was inaugurated in Belo Horizonte. Between 1943 and 1945 the building of the Brazilian Education Ministry was erected in Rio de Janeiro, signed by a team comprising Lucio Costa, Oscar Niemeyer, and Le Corbusier, which would come be considered a milestone in Brazilian modern architecture.

The movement of modern architecture asked for interiors consonant to its clean forms. To styles of the past, to brocades and velvets, unthinkable of in a tropical climate, new creators opposed radical forms: furniture and objects in tune with their here and now, adapted to their times, to the latitude and longitude where they were developed. As well as designing, one had to convince consumers. In her press articles, Lina dedicated herself to preaching: ‘Furniture has its own morality as well as raison d’être in its own times. Copying past styles, frills, fringes, is an indication of incoherent mentalities, alien to the morality of life.’

Architects themselves, such as Lúcio Costa, Oscar Niemeyer, Gregori Warchavchik, and John Gras, developed furniture focused on equipping the buildings they designed. Other professionals, however, dedicated themselves primarily to furniture design.

Before 1951, two names can be mentioned. The first one was Joaquim Tenreiro, a Portuguese immigrant, whose first piece of furniture exempt of ‘all Louises’ – as he would joke when referring to styles of furniture such as Louis XV, Louis XVI, etc. with which he would win his bread – was created in 1942. Trained as a cabinet maker, Tenreiro became capable of creating truly light forms. He would work with dense woods, particularly jacaranda, aiming at the higher end market. José Zanini Caldas, on the other hand, would use wood compensate, which he would cut into organic and amoeba-like forms. In 1948, he put together his own manufacture, Móveis Artísticos Z, with a dream of creating affordable projects in industrial scale.

After 1951, besides those already mentioned, we can also point out creators such as Sergio Rodrigues, Jorge Zalszupin, Geraldo de Barros, and Michel Arnoult, primarily dedicated to furniture design, and names such as Paulo Mendes da Rocha and even Oscar Niemeyer, who have designed furniture as consequence of their work with architecture. Among companies, we can highlight Estúdio Branco & Preto, Ambiente, Forma, Oca, L’Atelier, and Mobília Contemporânea.

These names advanced the idea of honest furniture with simple forms, free of ornament and with great care regarding design and execution, entailing subversion of concepts relative to front or back, right side or reverse, expressing integral quality. Woods were predominant in their designs, with their wide chromatic variety, as well as leather and woven cane – materials easily found in the country as well. In that sense, with her Bowl Chair design, Lina would go against the flow in a way, because she used metal. The structure was originally made of iron and the shell was an aluminum structure covered in fabric or leather.

Through Today’s Eyes

Today, Brazilian design from the 1940s and 1950s is going through a moment of great regard. Furniture antiquarians and European and American auction houses, up until recently almost exclusively dedicated to Scandinavian pieces, started to

Arper SPA Instituto Lina Bo e P.M. Bardi T +39 0422 7918 Via Lombardia 16 Rua General Almério de Moura, 200 F +39 0422 791800 31050 Monastier di Treviso (TV), Italy 05690-080-São Paulo (SP), Brasil [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] www.bardisbowlchair.arper.com www.arper.com www.institutobardi.com.br work with made in Brazil products over the past decade, and they soon acquired great prestige and renown. Prices have kept up with this evolution: in 2004, a Três Pés [Three Feet] Chair by Joaquim Tenreiro was sold in New York for US $54,000. In 2006, the same piece was appraised as being worth US $250,000 according to an article published by the segment magazine Art+Auction.

Vintage Bowls have also been part of such auctions, and in the decades that went by since its creation, a desire to possess this chair has been increasing steadily among collectors and informed consumers regarding design quality. After creating the Bowl Chair, Lina abandoned autonomous design projects. Among the factors that might have contributed to this decision, we can mention a growing possibility for her to work directly with architecture, designing and building outstanding public spaces, and her increasing involvement in folk culture, motivated by her contact with culture in the Northeast of Brazil – particularly Bahia state, where she lived for a period beginning at the late 1950s. She kept on designing furniture, but solely for her architectural projects.

The Bowl Chair remains, thus, as a rare effort in her career. And on the decades that have passed since its creation, a recognition of its expression of timeless design has been established, deeming it to remain forever young – a quality that is more and more fortuitous in a world where things are disposable and transitory.

Over the past few years, after periods in which form for the sake of form was celebrated, many efforts have been affirming their ability to improve people’s quality of life as the main characteristic of design, the only one that makes sense. As visionary and humanist par excellence, Lina anticipated this orientation. ‘Deep inside, I see architecture’ – and we could replace the word ‘architecture’ by ‘design’ – ‘as Collective Service and as Poetry,’ she once wrote.

By launching a re-edition of the Bowl Chair, Arper is one year short of the celebration of Lina’s 100th birthday (she was born on December 5, 1914, in Rome) and, above all, it offers to the market the possibility of access to a product that definitively became an icon of the 20th Century design and is, at the same time, totally in tune with ideas of freedom and flexibility so prevalent in today’s ethos.