Zeuler Lima explores the complexity of what constitutes Modern architecture by exploring the ambivalence in Lina Bo Bardi’s project for her renowned 1952 house, Casa de Vidro (House of Glass) in São Paulo, and her later design for the nearby Valéria P. Cirell House of 1958.

Though it has become well-known for its appeal as a Glass House on a promontory, a closer examination of the project history, her writings, and the completed house reveals a hybrid building. Like Janus, the two-faced deity of beginning and end that is in the etymological root of the word “janela” (window in Portuguese), the house where she lived for 50 years has both an industrial-looking front on pilotis and a vernacular-looking back directly enrooted into the ground. While the house was designed as part of a larger team effort to create an architectural showcase for Morumbi, a new neighborhood emulating California’s Case Study houses, Lina Bo Bardi tried to reconcile it with the interest in idealized rural and vernacular houses she shared with her generation of postwar Italian architects.

When, 5 years later, Bo Bardi was asked by Valéria Cirell, a personal friend, to design a new house 300 meters away from her own home, the architect proposed a small, solid cube covered with pebbles and plants surrounded by a thatched veranda. The proximity of time and space and the ideological and aesthetic contrast between the two houses allow us to contemplate her emancipation as an architect and the need to consider Modern architecture not simply as a hegemonic style but as the intersection of different cultural conditions, practices, and values.

Zeuler Rocha M. de A. Lima, PhD, CAU-BR, is an internationally accomplished designer, curator, educator, artist, scholar, and writer interested in a humanistic approach to art and the built environment. As the world expert on Italian-born Brazilian architect Lina Bo Bardi, Lima has authored several books on her life and works in English, Italian, Portuguese, French, Spanish, and Catalan. He earned professional and research degrees as an architect, landscape architect, and urbanist from the University of São Paulo, with a postdoctoral education in comparative literature from Columbia University.