Pietro Maria Bardi - the Vicarious Architect: the Importation of Italian Futurism to Brazil

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 [email protected] 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 27th 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 27th 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 26th 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.

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