ABSTRACT
The relationship between Lina Bo Bardi’s Museum of Art of Sao Paulo (MASP) and its precedents, including two buildings by Giuseppe Terragni, offers a fascinating example of the numerous ways architects critically engage their predecessors’ works through a process of creative misreading. Bo Bardi’s museum, designed in 1956 and completed in 1968, reveals careful and insightful readings of Terragni’s buildings both as built works and through their representation in print. Bo Bardi transformed Terragni’s work in a way that re-appropriates its intensely ideological use of physical transparency and relationships to public space to invest her museum with a completely different political content. Bo Bardi studied the lyrical and political uses of transparency in Terragni’s projects for the fascist regime and translated them into the democratic space of the MASP and its remarkable piazza.
