The Museum of Architectural Drawing presents Lina Bo Bardi – The Poetry of Concrete, an exhibition featuring 40 drawings by architect Lina Bo Bardi, shown together in Europe for the first time. Born Achilina di Enrico Bo in Rome in 1914, Bardi immigrated to Brazil with her husband Pietro Maria Bardi in 1946 and became one of the twentieth century's most influential architects. Her legacy received its greatest recognition in 2021, when she was posthumously awarded the Golden Lion at the Venice Architecture Biennale for her life's work.

In 2024, her work takes its place at the 60th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia. The exhibition draws from the Instituto Bardi collection—founded by Lina Bo and Pietro Maria Bardi—and presents works that evolved into six completed cultural projects: Casa de Vidro, Solar do Unhão, MASP (Museu de Arte de São Paulo), Teatro Oficina, SESC Pompéia, and Casa do Benin. These are spaces designed for gathering and exchange, created to unlock the social and cultural potential of architecture in society. Here, her architectural visions engage in dialogue with photographs by artist Veronika Kellndorfer, whose work investigates how architecture embodies and reveals the cultural memory of a society.

Lina Bo Bardi approached architecture with poetic vision and playful inventiveness, expressing her ideas through drawings that revealed her philosophy: buildings as total works of art. She embraced innovative materials—glass and concrete foremost among them—which, despite their structural tensions, create visual and conceptual harmony and remain foundational to Brazilian modernism. Her complete body of drawings presents a deceptively unpretentious range of motifs, each capturing her evolving thoughts on architecture, design, and living. Yet these sketches were never mere artistic statements or technical documentation. Instead, they functioned as visual manifestos—guiding principles that shaped the construction process itself. More profoundly, they capture something vital: an energy that translates into the physical spaces of architecture as atmosphere, meaning, and lived experience.

www.tchoban-foundation.de