O Impasse do Design - Mobiliário de Lina Bo Bardi: 1959 - 1992

As a complement to the first exhibition dedicated to the production of furniture by Lina Bo Bardi – Lina Designer: O Móveis dos Tempos Pioneiros 1947-1958, the second exhibition brings together Lina’s productions during the five years that the architect lived in the city of Salvador, Bahia.

Different from the first period, when Lina thought of her projects for series production and intended to shape, through industrial design, the directions of the recent and growing industrialization of the country and, therefore, transform society in the 1960s, with the rupture of the political and social processes resulting from the Military Coup, the architect realized the failure of that attempt at social transformation glimpsed in the years of the Brazilian democratic window.

In this new context, Lina continued to value national materials, especially wood, and to seek simplicity, based on popular and marginalized craft production, which can be “an indigestible, dry, hard-to-digest contribution” but are the matrix for an alternative development to finesse, imported gadgets and dependent capitalism. However, she focuses on the development of furniture for her architectural projects, no longer aiming at serial industrial production, such as, for example, the SESC Pompeia furniture set, each with different seating modes and uses; the Girafa and Frei Egydio chairs, respectively for the Casa do Benin restaurant and the Teatro e Fundação Gregório de Mattos, both in Salvador; or the  Cadeira de Beira de Estrada, just four sticks tied together creating a seat to rest on.

Curated by Renato Anelli, the exhibition occupied the area near the stairs and the entire social area of the Glass House, and featured furniture from the Instituto Bardi’s archive, as well as photographs, drawings and items from Lina’s popular art collection belonging to the archive of the institution, which were arranged in Marina Correia’s exhibitors, and added information and references to dialogue with the exhibited furniture.