Abstract
The year 2014 marked the centenary of the birth of Roman-born Brazilian architect Lina Bo Bardi. Among the best known of Lina’s many contributions to Brazilian modernism is Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP). Begun in 1957 and opened in 1968, MASP flouted European museological and museographical conventions, dissolving structural, temporal and hierarchical boundaries. Lina’s expressive architectonic forms and revolutionary exhibition scheme allowed the works in the MASP collection to literally stand on their own as objects liberated completely from chronological, connoisseurial and scholarly classification systems. Lina designed MASP to provoke ‘reactions of curiosity and investigation’ by redefining notions of space and form within and beyond the context of the museum as mausoleum, archive and treasury. This collaborative analysis examines the philosophical, theoretical, practical and formal elements of what John Cage purportedly characterized as ‘the architecture of freedom’. Toward that end, this article situates MASP and its collections within broader historical discourses of museum practice to reveal the transgressive genius of Lina’s architectural and museal gestures. We conclude with a discussion of current debates surrounding the conventionalization of MASP’s exhibition protocols, considered in the contexts of conservation and proposed changes to the structure and its immediate urban setting.