ABSTRACT
When architect Lina Bo Bardi designed the building for the Museum of Art of São Paulo (MASP) in the late 1950s in Brazil, she chose an uncommon configuration to occupy the space left by a traditional belvedere built in the 1910s. Rancière suggests the political negotiation of collective and individual identities in the public sphere as the emergence of new visible, pronounceable or feasible actions and actors in public spaces. Its architectural scale, ampleness, and free accessibility announced Lina Bo Bardi's concern with spaces of emancipation and political equality. Terraço do Trianon, the large open space under the concrete span of the MASP, has served as an important stage for the negotiation of social and cultural values in the history of the city. For almost twenty years, Parque do Trianon and the terraces were one of the main urban spaces staging the cultural, social, and political life of the agricultural, commercial, and industrial elites of São Paulo.
