This seminar celebrates fifty years of the MASP building at Avenida Paulista, designed by Lina Bo Bardi and inaugurated in November 1968. The discussion will be dedicated to the architecture of the building, the impacts of its project in the daily life of São Paulo, as well as the social and political uses of its freestanding space. The architecture of MASP is defined by its collective character and the public fruition of it, expressing the positioning of Lina towards sociocultural issues and the role of architecture in such debate. Its wide, aired, and transparent spaces propose a candid contact not only with its users, but also with the population that passes by the avenue. Although time has passed and brought along social and contextual changes, such as renovations of the building itself – whether of smaller or bigger relevance regarding its values and the structural-architectural design –, it is possible to say that the Museum maintains most of its initial character until the present day.
Lina’s MASP: Fifty years of the building at Avenida Paulista is a one-day seminar comprising presentations of local and foreign curators, architects, and historians in order to discuss the building’s history, conception, and uses over the past years. The seminar is also going to present dialogues between architects and engineers who collaborated in the construction of the building and with Lina herself, as well as among photographers who are working on new series about the building, to be included in the book ensuing of this event.
Other than the book, the seminar precedes the exhibition that MASP, in partnership with Museo Jumex (Mexico) and MCA Chicago (USA), will make in 2019 about Lina Bo Bardi, in a year that the museum will be dedicated to female and feminist histories.
Organization: Adriano Pedrosa, André Mesquita, and Guilherme Giufrida
FREE INSCRIPTIONS ON THE DAY OF THE EVENT
Tickets will be available two hours before the seminar at the Museum’s box office. In order to have a certificate, one needs to register her/his e-mail and full name, in addition of presenting an official document at the day of the event. The certificate will be sent for the registered e-mail at a later time.
10h
Introduction
10h10 – 12h
MARINA GRINOVER | The project of MASP: Translating an ideology of architecture and city
Departing from the premise that the building translates an idea of public space and art in the urban culture of São Paulo, we will revisit the history of its construction conducted by architect Lina Bo Bardi. The particular poetry of the museum’s headquarters at Avenida Paulista shows us the architect’s positioning towards the construction of meaning in the architectural work. An artistic and political dimension that was devised during her Italian education and by experiencing the Brazilian culture of the Sertão in the 1960s. It was during the development of the project of MASP that Lina Bo Bardi went deep into the Brazilian popular roots, finding a sere and undigestible cultural strength, yet genuinely national. The history of this project shows us the decantation of a peculiar meaning of the architectural work coalesced to an idea of national culture, citizenship, and progress that is necessarily inclusive and humanist.
EDUARDO ROSETTI | MASP: The museum in the trajectory of Lina Bo Bardi
MASP bears the most monumental aspect in terms of architecture among the works of Lina Bo Bardi. The headquarters of an institution whose architectural project is attuned with the Museum’s emancipatory, transforming, and ultimately revolutionary vocation. It is interesting to ponder about MASP as a counterpoint to other projects and works by Lina. The new headquarters of MASP is developed in a very singular moment of her professional career, time when she was in transit between São Paulo and Salvador, directing her anthropological regard to Brazilian culture, design, and the agency of a museum. Her experiences between the capital of São Paulo and the Northeastern region, between the project for the Museum of Popular Art and the School of Industrial Design and Craftmanship of Solar do Unhão, would be decisive to achieve the architecture of MASP, with further unfoldings in the architectural program of SESC Pompeia.
ZEULER DE LIMA | Reinventing the void
Lina Bo Bardi once stated that the MASP project had not been the result of an architectural extravagance. She acknowledged the advantages offered by the urban limitations of the terrain: the recreation of the historic Terraço do Trianon [Trianon Terrace] as an intermediary space between the museum and the city. Its current byname, the “void of MASP”, conveys the public character of a building and of an institution of major cultural originality in the daily life of São Paulo. Despite the clearly defined forms of the building, its ambiguous spaces have been continuously settling to the kaleidoscopic transformations of time. The empty and the full reveal the coexistence of spaces in physical and visual succession, all the while open and closed, outside and inside, in a constant reinvention of collectively shared meanings.
SILVIO OKSMAN | A contemporary look to the MASP building
Fifty years after its inauguration, the national and international acknowledgment of the MASP building is more than consolidated. At this point, it is suitable to study and understand which values of the building are comprised not only by its architecture, but by its cultural character in an all-encompassing meaning: in its social, urban, historical aspects. Such recognition is essential to the possibility of interventions oriented towards the building’s conservation and updating. Only then it will be possible to widen the museum’s action by taking care of one of its main heritages. The recent study of the structure of the building, financed by the Getty Foundation, allowed to elaborate on themes that give room to a new understanding. Still unpublished, this research brings forth information often left aside that allow to act with more safety in the preservation of the building.
12h15 – 13h15
LUCIA GUANAES
LUIZA BALDAN
NAIR BENEDICTO
Discussion
In this session, the photographers commissioned to perform new visual series about the MASP building at Avenida Paulista will present a preview of the images they are currently working on and approach their creative processes.
14h30 – 16h
MARCELO FERRAZ
MARCELO SUZUKI
ROBERTO ROCHLITZ
Discussion
Roberto Rochlitz, engineer of the MASP building at Avenida Paulista, will talk about the construction of it, the relations between architecture and engineering, as well as stories about Lina Bo Bardi, for whom project means process. The discussion will be mediated by architects Marcelo Ferraz and Marcelos Suzuki, who have worked with her in other projects.
16h30 – 18h30
GUILHERME WISNIK | Museums without aura
The project of MASP by Lina Bo Bardi represents one of the most radical architectural experiences of “destruction of the aura” of artworks, following the steps of Walter Benjamin. A gallery of floating canvases, ordered without an evident hierarchy. A setting that counterposes the architecture of the building itself, the structures of which suspend some of its floors. An attack to the elitist character of art and museums, for the sake of an institution of excellence that sought to be popular, allowing for an immediate empathy in the relation of the audience with artworks. This research finds parallel in the project of Affonso Eduardo Reidy for the Museum of Modern Art of Rio de Janeiro (1953) and even starts a little earlier, in the “museum be the ocean” projected by Lina in 1951, assembling inside spaces that recall the proposition of Mies van der Rohe for the “Museum for a small city”, dated of 1943.
BARRY BERGDOLL | The Museum in the city: From temple to catalyzer
Lina Bo Bardi’s brilliant combination of a plaza to be activated and a museum as transparent urban belvedere was at once a unique accomplishment and an original contribution to the trans-Atlantic debate on the form of a museum, the display of art, and on the role of a museum in the post-World War II city. This debate began in the 1940s centered equally in Italy, an obvious source of inspiration for Lina Bo Bardi, and in the United States. It first started approaching how the museum might be a place of inclusion rather than exclusion. It is interesting to bring into the discussion of Lina’s combination of un-programmed plaza and transparent galleries, the contemporary debates in the United States, which engaged such architects as Mies van der Rohe, Frank Lloyd Wright, Friedrich Kiesler, and the Saarinens, with key art theorists as Alexander Dorner.
OLIVIA DE OLIVEIRA | MASP 1968
The year of 1968 remains as a paradigmatic in the collective memory, marked by several demonstrations formulated by a new generation that, in Europe as in the Americas, claimed for another way of living, calling into question the dominating western culture and order. 1968 is marked by the heyday of the anarchic-libertarian spirit evoked by these movements, who was being constructed during the 1960s, but also by the attempt of violently and definitively suffocating it. 1968 coincides with the year MASP was inaugurated. How is this work marked by the historical events of that time? Such is the question approached in this presentation, leaning upon Lina Bo Bardi’s drawings for the museum to understand how it claims for freedom and utopia along with a whole generation of artists and intellectuals, while denouncing the obscure events of its time.