PREVIOUSLY OVERLOOKED BUT NOW CELEBRATED The careers of two women honored at the 2021 Architecture

PREVIOUSLY OVERLOOKED BUT NOW CELEBRATED The careers of two women honored at the 2021 Architecture Biennale Prof. Johannes M. P. Knoops

PREVIOUSLY OVERLOOKED BUT NOW CELEBRATED The careers of two women honored at the 2021 Architecture Biennale Prof. Johannes M. P. Knoops History has not been kind to the many women who shaped modernism.

Architecture is no exception. In this time of social re-evaluation, an opportunity is afforded to amend, in part, for past oversights. It is no different at the 2021 Biennale of Architecture, “How will we live together,” where the work of two tenacious women is now being celebrated, that of Lina Bo Bardi and Svetlana Kana Radevic.

Unrelated in several ways, yet equally fascinating, their careers are being commemorated here in Venice. At the personal discretion of Hashim Sarkis, the Director of this year’s Biennale, Lina Bo Bardi has been honored with a Golden Lion in memoriam, for lifetime achievement.

This is a rare occasion for a Golden Lion to be awarded to someone who has passed. This has only occurred once before when Kazuyo Sejima director of the 2010 Biennale honored the late Kazuo Shinohara, a man who influenced a generation of young Japanese modernists. Bo Bardi’s announcement was fittingly made on International Women’s day back on March 8th and presented at the Biennale’s inauguration on May 22, 2021.

On the other hand, it’s thanks to the young and passionate curatorial team of Dijana Vučinić and Anna Kats, that Svetlana Kana Radević is celebrated in an official Collateral Event of the 17th International Architecture Exhibition, Skirting the Center: Svetlana Kana Radevic on the Periphery of Postwar Architecture. This is a thoroughly documented and well-edited installation surveying the work and life of Kana (as she is more popularly known as) in the Palazzo Palumbo Fossati, which like the Biennale itself runs till November 21, 2021.

Achillina “Lina” Bo Bardi (1914 Rome — 1992 São Paulo) Over several years, the significance of Lina Bo Bardi’s work has been slowly brought to light through a number of exhibitions starting with the 1989 retrospective mounted while she was still alive by the University of São Paulo. Subsequently her work has been on exhibit at Ca’Pesaro, Venice, Italy (2004), Venice Architecture Biennale, Venice, Italy (2010), British Council, London, England (2013), Museu de Art Moderna da Bahia e Casa do Benin, Bahia, Brazil (2014), R & Company, New York, USA (2014), Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich, Germany (2015), MASP, São Paolo, Brazil (2019), Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona, Spain (2019), Gladstone 64, New York, USA (2019) and MAXXI , Rome, Italy (2020).

Top to Bottom: Casa de Vidro, 1951 (courtesy of Instituto Lino Bo e P.M. Bardi); the Bowl Chair as featured on the cover of the magazine Interiors 1951 (Francisco Albuquerque); Lina Bo and Pietro Maria Bardi, 1953 (MASP Research Center Collection); and Museum of Modern Art of São Paolo, 1958-68 (Hans Gunther, courtesy of Instituto Moreira Salles

Lina earned her degree in architecture at Rome’s La Sapienza in 1939 along with her Milanese classmate Carlo Pagani. After graduation she moved to Milan and with Pagani founded Studio Bo e Pagani.

Before attending La Sapienza, Pagani had studied with Gio Ponti at the Politecnico di Milano. After returning to Milan, he was gradually included in the editorial board of Domus and then Stile where he became its Editor-in-Chief until 1943. When the editorial board moved to Bergamo due to the war, he asked Lina to join him, where together they directed I quaderni di Domus and A – Attualità, Architettura, Abitazione, Arte.

Meanwhile in 1942, at the age of 28, Lina started her own practice in Milan. Though she lacked architectural commissions in these wartime years, she pursued her work as an illustrator for a variety newspapers and magazines. A year later, after being destroyed by Allied bombs, she abandoned her office and from 1944-45 Bardi served as the Deputy Director of Domus magazine. In late 1945, Bo Bardi, Pagani, and the photographer Federico Patellani documented the impact that World War II had throughout Italy for Domus, and with art critic Bruno Zevi published their findings.

Following her various collaborations with Carlo Pagani she moved back to Rome in 1946 where she met Pietro Maria Bardi a famous journalist, collector, and gallerist, who in 1931 hosted the Second Exhibition of Rationalist Architecture in his Galleria di Roma. They were shortly married and in the same year 1946, moved to Brazil where Assis Chateubriand, a well-known journalist and entrepreneur, invited Pietro Maria Bardi to establish and run the MASP (Museum of Modern Art of São Paolo), Brazil’s first modern art museum. To accommodate this new museum Lina worked with her husband to redesign several floors of Diarios Associados, the offices of Chateaubriand’s media business. The museum opened its doors to the public in 1947.

A few years later in 1950, she and Giancarlo Palanti, a fellow Italian immigrant, redesigned MASP to transform its traditional museum displays to incorporate more avant-garde installations similar to the work being done by the Rationalist architect Franco Albini back in Italy, where art was displaced from walls and objectified within an open plan.

With Palanti they founded Studio d’Arte Palma and produced affordable furniture. Lina’s many designs often incorporated Brazilian crafts and materials to create modernist works that connect with the traditions of her new country. Her most well-known piece, the “bowl” chair (1951) was recently produced in a limited series of 500 by Arper, SPA in collaboration with Instituto Bardi.

In addition to her more architectural interests, Lina pursued her interest

in jewelry designs involving Brazilian gemstones while also pursuing her editorial interests. Along with her husband in 1950 they founded the magazine Habitat-Revista das Artes no Brasil where she edited its first 15 issues. Habitat quickly became Brazil’s most influential architectural magazine, a perfect venue to eschew Italian Rationalism, a movement they both championed.

In 1951 she completed her landmark “Casa de Vidro” (“Glass House”) which served as their home until the deaths of herself and her husband’s.

In addition to this rationalist house shaped by its Brazilian rainforest context, she went on to design and construct a number of buildings, the most important being a new building for MSAP started in 1958 and completed some 10 years later. Elevated above a piazza designed to host community events, its main galleries hover above on four brutalist legs.

Additional galleries and support spaces form the platform below.

She designed the Museu de Arte Moderna for Bahia which she helped found, within the context of an 18th century sugar mill (1959-63).

Followed by the extensive SESC Pompéia Community Center which refurbished an old factory while adding structures of her own design (1977-86). And then the controversial Teatro Oficina (1986) which deployed generic scaffolding to create its interior. At times she referred to her approach as “Arquitetura Povera,” not unlike “Arte Povera,” the Italian art movement.

“Architecture and architectural freedom are above all a social issue that must be seen from inside a political structure, not from outside it.”

– Lina Bo Bardi

SESC Pompéia Community Center, 1977-86 (Nelson Kon)

Svetlana Kana Radevic (1937 Cetinje, Yugoslavia, now Montenegro—2000 Montenegro) Unlike the growing awareness of Lina Bo Bardi’s work, this is our first significant introduction to the works of Architect Svetlana Kana Radevic. It was a wise and timely choice to stage this at the 2021 Architecture Biennale. Though sited in Venice, the Biennale ideally provides a global platform for this long overdue entree.

Starting in 1955 Svetlana Kana Radevic attended the University of Belgrade and graduated from its Faculty of Architecture in 1963. Her undergraduate thesis was a design for a congress center, one that the curator Anna Kats recently stated in The Architectural Review, March 2020, “indicated broad familiarity with contemporary American and Brazilian architecture: a predilection for transparency, slab buildings and curtain walls in the tower is juxtaposed with the hall’s ambitious urban scale and curvilinear expressiveness, redolent of Brasília.”

Just a year after her graduation, Kana won a competition for the Hotel Podgorica located along the meandering Morača River in Montenegro.

This was her first built project. Forsaking the International vocabulary

of her student work, she eloquently fused contextual materialites, such as river stones, into a contemporary Brutalist idiom. Her design follows the inherent landscape of the Morača River in an organic and rhythmic manner to provide an exceptionally well-scaled composition.

This tour-de-force captured the public’s admiration prior to its 1967 opening, as the hotel was featured on the cover of Arhitektura Urbanizam, socialist Yugoslavia’s leading journal of architecture. Having been recognized as the country’s best new building in 1968, Kana was bestowed with the Federal Borba Prize for Architecture. At only age 29 it made her not only the first and only woman to have been celebrated with this honor, but also its youngest laureate to date.

This was followed by some urban planning work as part of a South Adriatic Regional Plan and a clever design for a concrete and river stone apartment block, Petrovac-na-Moru in Petrovac (1968), and then the Hotel Mojkovac in Mojkovac (1968-74).

In 1972 Kana won a prestigious Fulbright Scholarship affording her the opportunity to study in the United States. It took her to the University of Pennsylvania where she secured a coveted seat in Louis Kahan’s Master’s Class, making her the sole women within this 22-student cohort. Some recently discovered work from that time is included in this exhibition along with a letter written by the Chairman of the Graduate School testifying to her talent.

Having completed her M.Arch in 1973, it made Kana one of only 16 women to have ever graduated from Louis Kahn’s Masterclass over the course of its 19-year span. She matriculated into the University of Pennsylvania’s PhD program, yet she never completed her dissertation despite completing extensive coursework over three years. This is not uncommon even in the best of circumstances. With her funding cut in 1977 and impending construction on her Hotel Zlatibor in Užice, Serbia, her departure is quite understandable. Though her thirst for knowledge persevered, as she went on to Japan to work under Kishō Kurokawa who famously was a founder of the Japanese Metabolist Movement. He is most noted for his Nakagin Capsule Tower located in Tokyo, an architectural landmark which is now under threat. The dates of her tenure with Kurokawa and other key events in her life are sadly elusive, as is too often the case in researching the legacies of undercelebrated women.

She went on to lead a successful practice of her own which included such works as the monument to the Fallen Soldiers of Lješanska Nahija in Barutana (1975-80), Hotel Zlatibor, “the rocket” in Užice, Serbia (1981) and the Lexicographic Institute in Podgorica (1984-89), to name just a few.

Of her many works you might have been made familiar with the Hotel Podgorica and Hotel Zlatibor through MoMA’s 2018 exhibition

Top to Bottom: Hotel Podgorica, Montenegra (Spomenik Database), 1964-67; and Hotel Mojkovac, Mojkovac, 196874 (Kiemelt Tartolom); Svetlana Kana Radevic presenting to a jury including her Prof. Louis I. Kahn at the University of Pennsylvania (Radević’s personal archive, courtesy of APSS Institute); and Monument to the Fallen Soldiers of Lješanska Nahija in Barutana, 1975-80 (Luka Boskovic, courtesy of APSS Institute)

“Toward a Concrete Utopia, Architecture in Yugoslavia, 1948–1980” the first major US exhibition to study the subject, which included over 400 drawings, models, photographs, and films. Known within architectural circles as one of Montenegro’s best, Kana’s amazing personality achieved a certain level of public prominence within the former Yugoslavia.

“I am not for a monument that is experienced in one moment of intense emotions, in pain, in suffering, but rather for a continued experience, for the liberation of the sanctity and dignity, for the feeling that life triumphs over death.”

– Svetlana Kana Radevic For two intense years, Dijana Vučinić, Anna Kats and their team immersed themselves in this research as they compiled, scanned and categorized thousands of drawings, photos, negatives, letters and documents in order to produce this landmark exhibition. Their passion for this subject admittedly became an emotional one, as Dijana shared with me in an email. Yet despite all the amazing work to create this exhibit, this is just the beginning, as Kana’s legacy deserves even further investigation to achieve a more complete understanding. We owe this to history.

As passionate individuals mine the past to reveal overlooked gems, let’s hope for a future where all worthy work is celebrated despite race, orientation, creed, and the like. Many thanks to those selfless efforts made by Dijana Vučinić, Anna Kats and Hashim Sarkis to recognize the good in others.

Hotel Zlatibor, “the rocket” in Užice, Serbia, 1981 (Robert Conte, Flicker)

By Steven Varni

Motivated by issues of memory and place, Johannes Knoops explores hidden urban narratives. As a Professor of Interior Design at the Fashion Institute of Technology/SUNY, he shares his passion for a design to communicate meaning. In addition to his teaching, Knoops maintains a multi-disciplinary studio on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. jmpknoops@mac.com www.knoops.us