In the autumn of 2018, my classmate and soon-to-be friend suggested that we engage in the fashionable architecture-student activity of frequenting galleries on Saturday evenings. Newly alone in a country that was a stranger to me, I was not anticipating the warm embrace of the community of Spanish architects as I fell into the luscious Fundación Juan March and the brilliant curatorial work of Manuel Fontán del Junco, María Toledo Gutiérrez, and Mara Sánchez Llorens in their exhibition Lina Bo Bardi: Tupí or not tupí. It was easy to feel at home in the presence of Lina’s work, especially as a woman similarly seeking her place in a country she crossed an ocean to reach. The delight of her work—inviting, accessible, wearable—was palpable in person. I wanted to lie back in her bowl chair, put on her necklaces or wildly patterned costumes, try my hand at a childlike drawing, and buy flowers on the walk home. The hand-made quality of her drawings shone subtly on the yellowed papel vegetal which showed subtle marks, layers, registering the process its of creation; the work imbued with the complexity of time and labour. Lina always wanted her work to belong to real, everyday life—a value she was consistent in upholding in the making of her work. Born in Rome, Lina Bo’s early architectural education was steeped in the history of the ancients, from studying the drawings of their buildings to being taught restoration (distinct from rehabilitation) by Gustavo Giovanonni,¹ instilling in her the value and mindset of preservation, though one that she would eventually come to question and approach differently. In her later writing and lectures from Brazil, she speaks consistently of what she calls the “historical present” which, moving her conception of conservation towards what we might call cultivation, is “something living.”²

LBB: I always make the plea to keep something old and afterwards to have something modern come out of it. […] One has to know about city planning in order not to destroy things with something disproportionate, torbido [turbid], something that, historically speaking, has to be preserved. This is an important theory. […] I’d studied the issue from the first year at university and gone on pursuing it, because I see no difference between the historical and the modern aspect.³

Distinct from an anachronistic preservation, a cultivatory re-reading of Bo Bardi’s expansive work aims to nurture the aspects of her making of architecture which can live on today. The project of cultivation is apt to the study of Bo Bardi, whose sensibility of the botanical is evidenced in her idiosyncratic drawings. Her phenomenological reconsideration of nature makes her a relevant voice in the contemporary question of the natural world and humanity’s relationship to it. What amounts to a feminist ecological worldview allows for a consideration of the interrelations of environmental problems with social and subjective ones, amounting to what Félix Guattari called ecosophy.


The material specificity of Bo Bardi’s drawings and architecture as reflections of her theory and writings can be read as part of a phenomenological conception of the world, thus undermining a fundamentally dualist understanding of how humans relate to the natural environment. This dualist mindset is not only reflected in the world of architecture and the environment, but also in the ideologies of social and political realms, and is now being called into question through reflections on the failures that have led to the climate crisis. As inheritors of these failures, the youngest generations today do not know a world where the problem of  climate change is confined to the scientific realm only.  Unfortunately exempt from this convenient illusion, we experience firsthand what writers such as Bruno Latour⁴ and Naomi Klein⁵ incisively underline—that ecological systems are necessarily and reciprocally linked to social and subjective ones. Félix Guattari, in his 1989 book, Les trois écologies, formalized the relationship between “three ecological registers:” the environmental, social relations, and human subjectivity, which exist and interact in an “ecosophy.”⁶ Looking at the problem of climate change through an ecosophic lens, the manifold contemporary failures of the human world become inextricable from those of the natural world. In this understanding, the first step towards remedy is the desegregation of our ontological conception from other living things,⁷ a reconsideration which enfolds feminism and phenomenology in the pursuit of an ecological ethics. In the domain of architecture itself, revisiting Bo Bardi’s work serves to question assumptions that are due for reconsideration, in the hopes of cultivating an architectural practice that is both poetic and ethical.

In particular, this necessitates the re-evaluation of the activity of making our place in the world, a reframing that I think is crucially relevant to both the public’s and the architect’s own conception of the making of architecture. Revisiting Heidegger for a moment, we find an insightful etymological connection between building (bauen) and dwelling (buan) understood ontologically as “the manner in which we humans are on the earth.”⁸ In his distinction:

The old word bauen, which says that man is insofar as he dwells, this word bauen, however, also means at the same time to cherish and protect, to preserve and care for, specifically to till the soil, to cultivate the vine. […] Both modes of building —building as cultivating, Latin, colere, cultura, and building as the raising up of edifices, aedificare—are comprised within genuine building, that is, dwelling.⁹

Heidegger’s privileging of construction—which we have not yet outgrown—over cultivation can be understood as a result of a valuation of production over reproduction,¹⁰ as well as the product of an implicit male-bias for creative activity, which is, as argued by Luce Irigaray, only possible “on the basis of the materiality and nurturance of women.”¹¹ Heidegger’s fumbling over his patriarchal worldview¹² is a disservice to his anti-dualist philosophy in its affirmation of dichotomized, gendered hierarchy, as well as leading him to overlook a serious discussion of building as cultivation which is fundamental to his own conception of dwelling,¹³ a disappointment to the hopeful potential that a phenomenological worldview holds for reframing our collective understanding of our relation to our environment.

The project of cultivation necessitates a conception of history as memory, something that can be understood intuitively as that which we inherit. The deadening effect of historicity without relevance to the present is exactly opposite to Bo Bardi’s aim for architecture. Her goal to keep alive only the parts of the past which are relevant today, is executed with integrity, in her practice of re-use of existing buildings which are revitalized by her architectural interventions.¹⁴ This conception of a living past is consistent with the framework of cultivation. Iris Marion Young, a feminist political theorist, synthesizes feminist critiques of Heidegger’s privileging of construction, writing:

As a founding construction, making is a rupture in the continuity of history. But recurrence is the temporality of preservation. Over and over the things must be dusted and cleaned. Over and over the special objects must be arranged after a move. Over and over the dirt from winter snows must be swept away from the temples and statues, the twigs and leaves removed, the winter cracks repaired. The stories must be told and retold to each new generation to keep a living, meaningful history.¹⁵

The activity of cultivation is rooted firmly in the realm of perception rather than abstraction. Its temporality is non-linear, and it is not teleological. Rather than being an activity towards an end, it is the activity itself which holds meaning. As such, it is best understood in phenomenological terms, as an ontology that is not directed towards any end, but rooted in the experience of being. The word cultivation has its roots in the Latin cultura, a word that spawned from an understanding of agricultural tillage of soil that required care, protection, and nurturing.¹⁶ The original significance is indicative of the essentiality of the earth and our being-in-it. The practice of cultivation is not semiotic or symbolic, and it does not value ‘form’ over ‘matter’—as has been the result of the prioritization of (ideologically and technologically) abstracted construction. The critiques of architect and theorist Jennifer Bloomer warn of this danger in the embrace of innovation (a result of a temporally futuristic conception of history) in its potential for alienation from the earthly world.¹⁷ This is evident in its goal of achieving formal, if not synaesthetic, visual, ends, as well as its rejection of the substantive nature of matter in itself. The valuation of innovation may be countered by the phenomenological labour of architecture: maintenance.¹⁸ Here, “the body of the architect and that of architecture are entangled to a point where borders between object and subject collapse. […] If the work of the architect is associated with distance and abstraction, housework implies an opposite mode, defined by intimacy and the concrete.”¹⁹ Feminist critic, architect, and professor Catharina Gabrielsson elucidates the link between the phenomenological labour of maintenance and the ethical reconsideration of (unrecognized) feminine labour in the domain of housework, a poignant synthesis of direction towards the poetic and ethical in this reconsideration of the making of architecture.

The lack of recognition—personal, societal, representational, monetary—of housework as women’s labour has been well documented, if not heeded.²⁰ The particularities of ‘housework’ make the question of domestic labour relevant to architecture, though the relationship of design to maintenance and cleaning has not been considered by many architects outside of feminist theory.²¹ The absence of maintenance eventually leads to the death of buildings which, no matter the effort of innovative material technologies, inevitably weather, corrode, and ruin. Teresa Stoppani writes: “Dust occupies and measures the distance between architecture’s image and its physical realization, the non-coincidence of its idea and representation, and construction and inhabitation.”²² Of course, in the capitalist logic of consumption the death of buildings is not accidental, but constitutive and deliberate. The realms of environmental and domestic maintenance, or care, converge in the work of artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles, whose Manifesto for Maintenance Art 1969! Proposal for an exhibition “CARE” is a sadly fitting critique of the contemporary attitude towards the labour of care. In it, Ukeles defines “Three parts: personal, general, and Earth Maintenance,”²³ not unlike Guattari’s “three ecological registers: the environmental, social relations and human subjectivity.”²⁴ Ukeles’ didactic version of ecosophy is centred on the experience of daily maintenance work as a meaningful activity, a lesson that can be applied to architecture in a reconsidered understanding of practice.

It is difficult, of course, to accept a radical rethinking of architecture’s own ontology as purely hypothetical. Trying to understand a new concept, we might ask the obvious question: can you give me an example?

I point to one of Bo Bardi’s most overt and successful interventions that she made as an architect: the sports and leisure centre commissioned by SESC,²⁵ in and for an industrial area of São Paulo. Though this was not stipulated in the commission, she preserves rather than destroys the existing factory, her first radical proposal for the project.  When asked why she made this decision, Bo Bardi does not cite cost-saving or footprint-reducing factors (these are plainly evident outcomes), rather she recalls being “charmed” by “the elegant and innovative concrete structure.”²⁶ Olivia de Oliveira expands:

[Bo Bardi] preserved the image of the factory in order to undermine it: here work is the ally, and not the enemy, of pleasure. She has work lose its unpleasant, repressive, violent and painful side, and relates it to sensitivity, freedom, imagination and libido. The trademark designed for the new group, a chimney belching flowers instead of smoke, expresses this clearly.²⁷

Lina states her “desire to construct another reality,”²⁸ a project of architecture that is traditionally conceived of in the sense of aedificare, construction, but here undertaken by way of building understood as cultura, cultivation. Her disposition is here the driving force of a project which nurtures and cares for those aspects of what came before which can be kept alive for the present time. The work done by Lina may be conceived by some as the work of “decoration” that misunderstood and complex word. She writes: “We added just a few little things: a little water, a hearth.”²⁹ It should be evident, however, that these oft-overlooked ‘little things’ are exactly the force which breathes life into the shell of the old factory through the attuned use of substantive materials. These ‘decorative’ interventions take the form of “those gaping ‘holes’ like the openings in prehistoric cave dwellings, with no glass, no anything,”³⁰ and, as part of the genealogy of craftspeople, “this little chair, made completely of wood and without upholstery.”³¹

In an environment concerned with ecological responsibility, the necessity for cultivation has become more evident. With the goal of “sustainability,” longevity is a virtue. However, the investment in technological maintenance (having to do largely with innovation of functionality) prevails at the cost of the poetic potential of cultivation as a form of art, and thus has relegated questions of ‘sustainability’ to the realm of technicians and codes rather than that of designers.³² Hilary Sample’s Maintenance Architecture explores the design potential of a prioritization of continued care of a building after it’s “completion,” where the life of the building post-construction is considered by the architect.³³ She writes:

This manual upkeep, which is not maintenance, extends the building’s cycle of use, as order is alternately regained and lost. [The cleaner] makes the house new again—a creative act in its own right. Perhaps she is also making it a better version of itself, by the sheer repetitive nature of acts of cleaning and taking care.³⁴

First-wave feminism, however, in its emancipatory ethos, disparaged the activity of housework, not only for its unequal distribution of labour across the genders, but also designating it as a meaningless activity in itself.³⁵ This is a belief shared by the variously commodified empowerment movements, perpetuated most commonly by a privileged class.³⁶ This perspective disparages “the neurotic, or compulsive, renewal of things within the household” for its potential role in engendering boredom, ennui.³⁷

Ennui is a way of being, enmeshed in the everydayness of life. […] Ennui is viable; it may become habitual. In English etymology, the word malady comes from “male habitus” or “in bad shape.” Habitat, habit, habitus, and malady all belong to the same family of words, which reveals striking connections. […] As a malady of duration, ennui can lead to a lack of hope, to a lack of belief in values. Within a state of boredom, any criteria of evaluation disappear.³⁸

The role of cultivation in architecture has thus been stripped of its poetry and its ethics and been relegated to the malady of technical maintenance. Lina’s work, however, serves as a reminder of an alternative disposition toward cultivation. Lina’s Museum of Art of São Paulo (MASP) is a place of convergence for her many ideas about architecture, its role in society and the earth, as well as its making by architects, engineers, construction workers, and inhabitants. Its bright-red legs stand firmly between the monotone rhythm of skyscrapers and its glazed, concrete body spans an improbable 70-metres. Yet, much like the Casa de Vidro, the building reveals its substance in realms beyond just the visual one; the second part of the museum is, like in Lina’s house, a half-buried ground, acting as the weighty counterpoint to the airborne volume. We can see from her atmospheric drawings of the MASP that the buried portion of the museum acts as the ground for an outdoor plaza, which passes under the floating body, through to the large avenue, protecting the Trianon Park by establishing a framed image of it, as well as more subtly linking the atmospheres of the locations. In this same drawing, along with two perspectival views of the underside of the floating part, Lina worked to imbue this space with place-ness; adorning it with vegetation and works of art, explicitly in service of an atmosphere that is for humans. As is visible from images of different moments in time, the plaza is not always alive in this way. Between the years 1994 and 2008, the president of the museum, Julio Neves, placed barriers—screens, ticket booths, a cloakroom counter—which stood as obstructions to the flow of life previously possible here.³⁹ His material sensitivity was lacking as well; in replacing the Goiás stone floor, a paving of “natural ‘cobbles’, in the best Ibero-Brazilian tradition,”⁴⁰ with polished granite.⁴¹ This insensitivity is not, as one might expect, the result of simply opposing the static preservation of the original, rather it is arises as a result of failing to recognize that ongoing, renewed cultivation of place is necessary to keeping particular aspects of the architecture alive.

Confirming their ideological opposition to Lina, Neves and (former curator) Luis Marquez removed Lina’s ‘glass easels’ from the exhibition.⁴² These easels are perhaps the most condensed iteration of Lina’s belief in non-linear time⁴³ and in the appropriation of the past for present use, of the role of the body in its navigation through and within the substantive material as a mode of understanding. Finn Beames writes insightfully of his firsthand experience of the return of the glass easels:

Artworks spanning continents and thousands of years were lined up in transparently fringed rows, at once immovably grounded by massive cubes of concrete, and floating into the air on glinting panels. […] Snaking through the rows of (mostly) paintings, it’s possible to contemplate each work individually, but the almost-liquid easels also lap against each other, allowing histories to shift around you. […] Alongside all the other thoughts it provoked, is the idea that a contemporary material context can fully acknowledge all its histories and neighbours, without compromising its own aesthetic present. […] You can only understand the past if you are living, and what did Lina leave behind that isn’t alive?⁴⁴

Contrary to the idea that cultivation as maintenance is necessarily in the realm of the technological, and not the artistic, and that domestic work is doomed to ennui and hopelessness in a rejection of “the everydayness of life,”⁴⁵ Lina’s work reminds us that cultivation can be both poetic and ethical.

Lina extolled the poetic in Brazilian popular traditions⁴⁶ and has spoken of achieving poetry as a goal for her own work,⁴⁷ the presence of which can perhaps be better felt than explained. The uncompromising balance that Lina sought to maintain between these two virtues—today so polarized that one is always sacrificed for the other—is a mark of her particular nature that we must cultivate in contemporary practice. Her architecture, as well as her approach to making it, does not promise to sequester carbon or act as a defence against the rising seas, ending our responsibility to cease extracting and burning fossil fuels; rather, it stands as an example of a foreign woman bringing her alternative values, disposition, and care to the profession. Inaugurating her magazine, Lina writes:

‘Habitat’ encompasses ambience, dignity, convenience, an ethical approach to life, and therefore spirituality and culture; that’s why we’ve chosen as our title a word that is intimately connected to architecture, an activity we see as having a social function as well a place in art. ⁴⁸

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1 Olivia de Oliveira, “Biography,” 2G: revista internacional de arquitectura, no. 23 (2002), 206.
2 Lina Bo Bardi, “An Architectural Lesson (1989),” in Stones Against Diamonds, trans. Anthony Doyle and Pamela Johnston, Architecture Words 12 (Architectural Association Publications, 2013), 135.
3 Lina Bo Bardi, “Interview with Lina Bo Bardi,” interview by Olivia de Oliveira, 2G: revista internacional de arquitectura, no. 23/24 (2002), 253.
4 Bruno Latour, Nous n’avons jamais été modernes (La Découverte, 1991).
5 Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism Vs. The Climate (Simon and Schuster, 2014).
  ———. On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal (New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, 2019).
6 Félix Guattari, The Three Ecologies, trans. Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton (London ; New York: Continuum, 2005), 28.
7 Gilles Clément, The Planetary Garden: And Other Writings, trans. Sandra Morris and Gilles A. Tiberghien, Penn Studies in Landscape Architecture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 13-16.
8 Martin Heidegger, “Building Dwelling Thinking,” in Basic Writings: Martin Heidegger, trans. David Farrell Krell (Taylor & Francis Ltd, 1993), 349-50.
9 ibid.  
10 Plumwood, “Dualism: The Logic of Colonialism.”, 43.
11 Iris Marion Young, “House and Home,” in On Female Body Experience: “Throwing Like a Girl” and Other Essays (Oxford University Press, 2005), 124.
12“when I say “a man,” and in saying this word think of a being who exists in a human manner—that is, who dwells…” Heidegger, “Building Dwelling Thinking”, 358.
13 “In what way does building belong to dwelling? The answer to this question will clarify for us what building, understood by way of the essence of dwelling, really is. We limit ourselves to building in the sense of constructing things and inquire: what is a built thing?” Heidegger, “Building Dwelling Thinking”, 353-4.
14 Condello and Lehmann, Sustainable Lina, 6.
15 Young, “House and Home”, 143.
16 TLL.
17 Jennifer Bloomer, “The Matter of the Cutting Edge,” Assemblage, no. 27 (August 1995), 109.
18 Hilary Sample, Maintenance Architecture (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2016).
19 Catharina Gabrielsson, “The Critical Potential of Housework,” in Architecture and Feminisms: Ecologies, Economies, Technologies, ed. Hélène Frichot, Catharina Gabrielsson, and Helen Runting (London: Routledge, 2017), 246.
20 Notably led by feminist Marxist activists Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Selma James and Silvia Federici in the 1970s as part of the “Wages for Housework” campaign, continued in the theorization of ‘affective labour’ by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, to contemporary artists such as Patti Maciesz whose project “Bill the Patriarchy” mobilizes these theories for political activism.
21 For an illustration of this, see: Ila Bêka and Louise Lemoine, Koolhaas Houselife, Documentary, 2013.
22 Teresa Stoppani, “Dust Revolutions. Dust, Informe , Architecture (Notes for a Reading of Dust in Bataille),” The Journal of Architecture 12, no. 4 (September 2007), 439.
23 Mierle Laderman Ukeles, “Manifesto for Maintenance Art 1969! Proposal for an Exhibition ‘CARE,’” Journal of Contemporary Painting 4, no. 2 (October 1, 2018), 233–37.
24 Guattari, The Three Ecologies, 28.
25 SESC: Serviço Social do Comércio, a Brazilian private non-profit.
26 Lina Bo Bardi, “The Architectural Project (1986),” in Stones Against Diamonds, trans. Anthony Doyle and Pamela Johnston, (Architectural Association Publications, 2013), 119-125 .
27 Olivia de Oliveira, “SESC Fábrica Pompéia, São Paulo,” 2G: revista internacional de arquitectura, no. 23 (2002), 112.
28 Bo Bardi, “The Architectural Project,” 121.
29 ibid.
30 “I have the same aversion to air conditioning as I have to carpets. […] The ‘holes’ allow for continual cross-ventilation.” Bo Bardi, “The Architectural Project,” 124.
31 ibid., 123.
32 Sample, Maintenance Architecture, 5.
33 ibid., 159-180.
34 ibid., 101.
35 As elucidated by Young in "House and Home”, this is most explicit in the arguments of Simone de Beauvoir and Luce Irigaray. See: Simone De Beauvoir and Baker & Taylor Axis 360, “The Married Woman,” in The Second Sex, 2012, Chapter 5, and Luce Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian Gill (London: Athlone Press, 1993).
36 For an expansion of this point of view, see: bell hooks, “Homeplace: A Site of Resistance,” in Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics (Taylor and Francis, 10), 41–49.
37 Georges Teyssot and Catherine Seavitt, “Boredom and Bedroom: The Suppression of the Habitual,” Assemblage, no. 30 (August 1996), 52-53.
38 Teyssot and Seavitt, “Boredom and Bedroom,” 54.
39 Olivia de Oliveira, “Concerning Lina Bo Bardi,” 2G: revista internacional de arquitectura, no. 23 (2002), 9-11.
40 Lina Bo Bardi, “The New Trianon (1967),” in Stones Against Diamonds, trans. Anthony Doyle and Pamela Johnston, (Architectural Association Publications, 2013), 103.
41 Oliveira, “Concerning Lina Bo Bardi”, 10-11.
42 ibid., 14-15.  
43 “Linear time is an invention of the West, time is not linear—it is a marvellous tangle in which, at any moment, ends can be chosen and solutions invented, without beginning or end.” Marcelo Carvalho Ferraz and Instituto Lina Bo e P.M. Bardi, Lina Bo Bardi (São Paulo: Empresa das Artes : Instituto Lina Bo e P.M. Bardi, 1993),  327.
44 Beames, “Lina Bo Bardi Fellowship 2015: Travelogue #3 | Blog | ADF | British Council.”
45 Teyssot and Seavitt, “Boredom and Bedroom,” 54.
46 For Bo Bardi’s writing concerning this, see: Bo Bardi, “Beautiful Child,” and Bo Bardi, “The Northeast,” in Stones Against Diamonds, trans. Anthony Doyle and Pamela Johnston, (Architectural Association Publications, 2013).
47 For Bo Bardi’s writing concerning this, see: Bo Bardi, “House in Morumbi,” and Bo Bardi, “Intensive Therapy,” in Stones Against Diamonds, trans. Anthony Doyle and Pamela Johnston, (Architectural Association Publications, 2013).
48 Lina Bo Bardi, “Preface,” Habitat 1 (Oct-Dec 1950): 1, quoted in (studio) Julia, Habitats, 3.