Suburbs and modern architecture

landscape architectures by Oswaldo Bratke and Lina Bo Bardi

Abstract

In the history of modern architecture, the suburbs designed by renowned architects have been less examined than the houses they constructed in such places. The modern architects Oswaldo Bratke (1907-1997) and Lina Bo Bardi (1914-1992), who worked in São Paulo, exemplify this issue well. It is little known that the Paineiras do Morumbi (1949) neighborhood, one of the suburbs that Bratke designed for the district of Morumbi, was the site where he built his own residence (1951) and also the house of Oscar Americano (1952), among others highlighted works of his career. Likewise, the Itamambuca Complex (1965), which Bo Bardi planned for the outskirts of the city of Ubatuba, does not figure among her best-known works, as is the case of her masterful Casa de Vidro (1949) and Valeria Cirell house (1958), which were both also built in Morumbi, next to Bratke’s planned neighborhood. When set side by side, the designs of Paineiras do Morumbi and Itamambuca Complex, although separated in time by more than fifteen years, still raise mutual and relevant questions for the critical appraisal of modern architecture and urbanism. This article wishes to shed light on the relationship between suburbia and modern architecture, through the figures of Bratke and Bo Bardi, examining not only the architecture of the house, but also what we could call an architecture of a territory, or using the terms adopted by the Bardi’s Habitat magazine, “landscape-architectures”.