Glass House (Casa de Vidro)

Lina Bo Bardi and Pietro Maria Bardi bought a plot of still-rural forest in Morumbi in 1949, two and a half years after emigrating from a defeated, bombed-out Italy, and Bo Bardi designed her own house on it as her first completed building in Brazil, finished in 1951. A glazed volume containing the living spaces sits on slim steel pilotis a full storey above the sloping ground, leaving the existing forest floor to run in underneath it undisturbed rather than being levelled for a foundation, while an opaque service block of servants’ quarters and kitchen sits separately at grade behind it. Furniture, some designed by Bo Bardi herself, mixed deliberately with popular Brazilian craft objects and international modern pieces the couple collected. The house doubled from the start as a laboratory for the modern-yet-vernacular language she went on to develop at MASP and SESC Pompéia. Listed by Brazil’s federal heritage institute IPHAN in 2003, it is now run as a house museum by the Instituto Bardi, which the couple founded.