Achillina Bo graduated in architecture in Rome in 1939, moved to Milan to work with Carlo Pagani and Giò Ponti, lost her own studio to an air raid in 1943, joined the Italian resistance and by 1944 was deputy director of Domus. In October 1946, married to the critic Pietro Maria Bardi, she sailed for Brazil; she became a Brazilian citizen in 1951, the year she finished her first building, the Glass House in Morumbi. English Wikipedia records that she found acceptance among Brazilian architects difficult, as both a foreigner and a woman. What followed — the São Paulo Museum of Art, the Bahia museums, the SESC Pompéia factory conversion — filtered modern concrete through Brazilian popular craft and use. "I did not look for beauty," she wrote of MASP. "I looked for freedom."
