Lina and Milan: the education of a woman architect in a city in crisis

Before becoming one of the most important names in modern architecture in Brazil, it was in the city of Milan that Lina Bo Bardi began to outline her professional trajectory. Her academic training, however, took place in Rome. Lina was one of the first women to enter the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Rome La Sapienza, one of the country's most traditional institutions. She graduated in 1939 with a project focused on motherhood and childhood, inspired by the urban proposals of Luigi Piccinato.

But it is only the following year, in 1940, after passing through Venice to obtain her professional license, that Lina arrives in Milan. The choice was not casual. “Without much fanfare, she arrived in her new city in search of ways to fulfill her ambitions,” writes Zeuler R. Lima in the biography "Lina Bo Bardi: what I wanted was to have a story".

Lina Bo Bardi na época da faculdade em 1938 (Instituto Bardi/CASACOR)

Far from Rome, which she considered stagnant due to fascist monumentalism, Lina sought a more dynamic project, where she could experience her independence. “Rome was a stagnant city. All of Italy was somewhat stagnant. But Milan was not,” she said.

At that moment, Milan was Italy's main industrial center. Unlike other Italian cities, more associated with the classical past, it asserted itself as a productive hub where architecture, design, and communication intertwined. It was also the laboratory of Italian rationalist architecture. But the city that Lina encountered was on the brink of collapse.

Maquete do Trabalho de Graduação Interdisciplinar (TIG) de Lina. Roma, 1939 (Instituto Bardi/CASACOR)

With Europe already plunged into the Second World War, the fate of Lina and Milan would change drastically on June 10, 1940. It was on this date that Mussolini declared war on France and the United Kingdom, formalizing Italy's entry into the conflict on the side of the Axis.

From then on, the war ceased to be a distant piece of news and became a brutal reality: due to its industrial and logistical relevance, Milan became a priority target for strategic bombings by the British RAF (Royal Air Force). In the months that followed, between June and December 1940, the city began to accumulate deep scars, with material destruction and human losses that would define the setting in which Lina would begin her professional practice.

Destruição da Basílica de Santo Ambrósio em 1943 (Divulgação/CASACOR)

This experience profoundly marked her professional beginnings. At first, Lina tried to maintain a stable routine, collaborating with Gio Ponti at the magazines Stile and Domus. However, in 1943, the war became personal and devastating: her office on Via del Lauro, maintained in partnership with Carlo Pagani, was completely destroyed by a bombing.

"Nothing was left. Not a single drawing, not a single sheet of paper", reports Lina Bo Bardi.

Revisiting that period, she would sum it up firmly: she began working as an architect “when nothing was being built, only destroyed.” If the war imposed a physical rupture with the destruction of her office, Milan offered in return a profound intellectual transformation. Despite the fascist regime, the city concentrated an active cultural resistance. Lina became involved with the Italian Communist Party (PCI) and took part in the Resistance, where politics and architecture merged in her thinking.

Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II após bombardeio em 1943 (Divulgação/CASACOR)

The city provided what she would recognize as a “human and political education”: direct contact with the shortages of urban life and the real crises of the population. In the final years of the conflict, Milan became the center of a clandestine intellectual articulation. Since free debate was forbidden, architects and intellectuals, such as Bruno Zevi and the founders of the Movimento Studi Architettura (MSA), met in secret to plan the reconstruction of Italy. They rejected the monumental aesthetics of fascism and discussed a new outlook: the Cultura della Vita (Culture of Life).

This "Culture of Life" was the belief that architecture should abandon purely aesthetic concerns to focus on what was urgent: social housing, the reconstruction of destroyed neighborhoods, and the dignity of everyday life. Instead of palaces, the focus shifted to the school, the hospital, and the workers' house.

It was on this ground of rubble and ideals that the Lina Bo Bardi was born who would arrive in Brazil in 1946: a professional who did not see the building merely as an aesthetic object, but as a social response necessary to everyday life.