Lina Bo Bardi: Architecture Designed Around People

For Lina Bo Bardi, architecture was not meant to astonish. It was meant to help people live better. This strikingly contemporary idea lies at the heart of The Poetics of Survival, the first exhibition in mainland China devoted to the Italian-Brazilian architect, hosted by the Power Station of Art in Shanghai. Through drawings, models, photographs, and archival materials, the exhibition explores the work of a designer who turned scarcity into opportunity, finding beauty in everyday gestures and shared spaces.
After moving to Brazil in 1946, Lina Bo Bardi created some of the twentieth century’s most iconic buildings. The luminous Glass House, immersed in tropical vegetation, dissolves the boundary between architecture and nature, while the São Paulo Museum of Art (MASP), suspended from a monumental red structure, frees the ground level and transforms it into a public square open to the city. The exhibition presents the portrait of a figure who made architecture a tool for inclusion, encounter, and participation - a lesson that, decades later, still speaks powerfully to the present.