LINA BO BARDI
GIANCARLO PALANTI
STUDIO D'ARTE PALMA
16 APRIL 2018
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29 DECEMBER 2018
NILUFAR DEPOT
VIALE LANCETTI 34
MILANO
i.

IN SEARCH OF MODERN BRAZILIAN FURNITURE

ZEULER R. M. DE A. LIMA

São Paulo boomed economically in the 1940s and 1950s. Industrial development and the emergence of an urban middle class propelled the modernization of everyday life, including the experimentation with furniture design. The search for the renovation of symbolic expression transformed the city into an important cultural laboratory. As such, it attracted several European artists and intellectuals, including many Italians. Among them were the couple Lina Bo (1914-1992) and Pietro Maria Bardi (1900- 1999) as well as Giancarlo Palanti (1906-1977), who developed a short though meaningful design partnership between 1949 and 1950. The opportunity Brazilian press magnate Assis Chateaubriand offered Bardi to create and direct the Museum of Art of São Paulo (MASP) in 1947 helped advance the investigation of industrial design in Brazil. This enterprise allowed Bardi and his young wife to expand the multiple activities he had developed in Italy as a gallerist and journalist, helping change the city’s and country’s cultural panorama and creating a broad network of collaborators both locally and internationally. In partnership, they created complementary programs supporting the museum’s educational mission as well as Bardi’s commercial aspirations.

The museum opened in 1947 and operated as a cultural powerhouse, combining two floors of Chateaubriand’s press headquarters highrise building filled with innovative cultural activities and exhibitions, the editorial offices of the thought-provoking articles of Habitat magazine, and, a few floors above, the educational programs in art, design, and music promoted by its Instituto de Arte Contemporânea. Bardi had developed his entrepreneurial skills and networking abilities in the Italian cultural world as a promoter of modern art and architecture in Turin and Milan in the late 1920s. He established himself in Rome after becoming the director of the state-run Galleria di Roma in the early 1930s, expanding his editorial activities to include the influential Quadrante magazine with Massimo Bontempelli, and finally opening his private Galleria d’Arte Palma in 1944.

Lina Bo Bardi started her professional career at the outset of the war after moving from Rome to Milan in 1940. She initially worked as an illustrator, writer, and editor for several design and varieties magazines such as Lo Stile and Domus, dedicated to the modernization of interior and furniture design. At the end of the war, she became involved in the efforts of Reconstruction, having co-created the polemical and short- lived magazine A, Cultura della Vita with Bruno Zevi and Carlo Pagani. In addition, she produced studies for a large home furnishing exhibition and designed an innovative stand for Rhodia textiles at the Milan Triennale. All those experiences helped shape the mission and activities promoted by the Bardis in São Paulo soon after their arrival in Brazil and their search for the character Brazilian industrial design.

In addition to the public programs promoted by MASP, Bardi decided to transfer his Roman art gallery to São Paulo in 1948 with Bo Bardi’s help and to create a design studio catering to his commercial interests. They kept the original name, which sounded even more relevant in its new tropical landscape, and called it Estúdio de Arte e Arquitetura Palma Ltda. In addition to selling paintings and art objects to the city’s newly educated elites, they also created a small firm to design home and commercial interiors and to manufacture modern furniture. In tribute to native woods and to Oswald de Andrade’s 1920s modernist manifesto, they called the studio Oficina Paubra, short for pau-brasil or brazilwood workshop. The Bardis’ new gallery and studio was located just two blocks away from MASP and right at the center of the city’s effervescent cultural life. A contractual document makes clear who was in charge of the business, by stating that, “Achillina Bo Bardi, Italian, married, is duly authorized by her husband to run a business.” She was the boss.
However, given their commitment to the museum and their lack of local connections, they decided to include two collaborators to help with the commercial front of their new endeavor. Valéria Piacentini Cirell, a local dealer and interior designer who assisted them in the gallery and played an important social liaison between the Bardis and their potential Paulistano clientele. The Bardis also invited Italian émigré architect and designer Giancarlo Palanti to help produce a line of modern furniture for the local market. Palanti had arrived in Brazil more or less at the same time as the Bardis had. He was almost ten years older, more experienced than Bo Bardi, and subscribed to a different lineage of modern design. Unlike her, he had been deeply immersed in the rationalist milieu of Milan since the early 1930s, closely collaborating with Giuseppe Pagano and Enrico Persico in exhibitions such as the Triennale and especially with Franco Albini in design projects and as editor of Domus and Casabella magazines. Though Bo Bardi admired their strictly rationalist approach, as shown in her illustrations for articles she published in the early 1940s, she developed a hybrid design language. She had already anticipated the philosophy motivating the creation of Oficina Paubra in one of the articles about modern furniture that she wrote for A, Cultura della Vita just over two years prior. Her previous insistence on “placing Italian craftsmen in small industries and having furniture designed by technical experts” seemed in principle to make sense in Brazil, where “architects were too busy with the urgency of building projects and could not dedicate themselves to the study of a chair.” Despite such effort, she would soon realize that her new country did not have the same artisanal tradition she was accustomed to, and she quickly readjusted her approach to accept the country’s limited resources. While Bo Bardi had been involved with everyday culture in her last years in Italy, Palanti had followed the introduction of Taylorist industrial working for industrialist Adriano Olivetti in Milan.

They brought different approaches to the development of several chair and shelving prototypes they expected to reproduce in limited series. Despite their different approaches and having some times worked in a few pieces separately, it would be reasonable to consider that their artistic and intellectual exchange was vital to their studio’s production. Their partnership, as much of the work Bo Bardi developed throughout her career, is evidence of the fact that the creative active is more nuanced than the divisions the art and design market tends to prescribe. Pagani and Bo Bardi divided their collaborative work between jobs for magazines and small commissions. She initially helped him with graphic material for furniture, home interior, and exhibition design, and especially with editorial projects, while he maintained some autonomy from her in residential projects. Much of this history was registered by Bo Bardi in articles she published in the first issues of Habitat magazine. She considered her collaboration with Palanti as “the first attempt to manufacture modern furniture (not at an industrial scale) out of cut plywood sheets (instead of Alvar Aalto’s bent pieces) and other local materials,” even though Palanti seems to have had control over the design of many chairs. “We also used a great amount of plain cotton fabric from Casas Pernambucanas and leather,” she added, “instead of the very expensive hand-woven fabrics used at the time.” They chose the simplicity and economy of means, “taking advantage of the extraordinary beauty of the grains and colors as well as the strength and durability of Brazilian wood.” Among the enduring examples of their work together are the wooden and steel-frame tripod chairs that emulate the hammocks used in the boats that sail along large Brazilian rivers. Bo Bardi described them as working as “both a bed and a seat—its wonderful adjustment to the shape of the body and its undulating movement make it one of the most perfect devices for rest.” To her, a chair designed as a “simulated ‘mechanical’ object” was as misguided as the “contemporary reproduction of a Louis XV chair.” Instead, she chose simplicity and contextualization. She believed that “to make a chair, it is not worth going through the trouble of looking for an [elaborate] design solution, since all you need is a surface [to sit] and four legs,”the same way that in order to create a “clothes hanger, a nail suffices.”

While Palanti’s exacting hand and rigorously plain geometries dominated the composition of their collaborative work, the effect of Bo Bardi’s spontaneous free- hand and undiscriminating imagination could be seen in vibrant and irregular details. Despite having produced important experiments, their furniture workshop and commercial partnership started to show signs of breakdown, even though he would remain temporarily connected to the museum’s Art Institute. After almost two years of operation Oficina Paubra closed its doors, partly because some confusion existed concerning patent laws in Brazil, and this was affecting their commercial output. For example, Carioca furniture designer Zanine Caldas contacted them to produce a new chair without knowing that the project he was presenting had actually come out of a chair already designed by Palanti and Bo Bardi. Still, it would not be unlikely to image that the termination of their business was due to their personal differences and, above all, to the struggle they faced in trying to convince local furniture makers to integrate innovative design ideas into their large-scale but traditional production system. Despite their short-lived collaboration, they were able to give their enterprise a cultural dimension under the umbrella created by the Museo de Arte, São Paulo.

At the start of their collaboration, Bo Bardi organized an exhibition at the museum about the history of chair design, ranging from fifteenth century Tuscan pieces to early-twentieth century examples by Le Corbusier and Alvar Aalto. Like many of the shows the Bardis organized, the coexistence of different styles and periods dictated the display. In an article she published about the show in 1949, she expressed her loyalty to the hybrid sensibility of her Italian publications. She wrote, “A grumixaba chair is more ethical than a couch with trimmings,” unmistakably introducing the work principles of the Paubra workshop. And to make it even clearer, she announced: “We placed the picture of a man sitting on a rock next to the picture of a woman sitting in a sophisticated and wrongly proportioned armchair that was more suitable to an elephant than to a human being.”

Only Lina Bo Bardi could have imagined such a comparison.

ii.

LINA BO BARDI DESIGNER

ANNA CARBONCINI

The Bardis arrived in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in October 1946, bringing with them a priceless cargo of antique and contemporary Italian artwork, and the finest Italian objet d’art and crafts destined to be displayed in a series of three exhibitions. Two of the exhibitions were held in the then recently constructed (1936-1945) Ministério da Educação e Saúde building while the third exhibition, of decorative objects, was held at the Copacabana Palace Hotel.
The exhibitions were planned as a commercial venture; Rio de Janeiro was to be the first stop on a trip that would include other capitals across South America. The journey was planned to last two years depending on the success of the sale of the pieces.
Rio de Janeiro captivated Lina from the outset. She was enchanted by the contemporary architecture and the more relaxed, less hierarchical atmosphere than that back home in Italy. Inspired by the sense of freedom, war-ravaged Italy was far from her mind. She was happy.
P.M. Bardi met Assis Chateaubriand during the first few days of the Italian Antique Art exhibition and established a special rapport with “Dr. Assis” which led to his accepting his offer to construct a new museum. Although this was a challenging project, since he was not a museologist, he loved the challenge and appreciated the importance of a new museum to a population unused to seeing works of art everywhere.

São Paulo, the most affluent area in Brazil, was chosen as the location of the new museum so in 1947 the Bardi family moved there to begin work on it, planning for an October opening. São Paulo didn’t hold the same attraction for Lina as Rio de Janeiro but she was absorbed by the great amount of work to be done. She oversaw the setting up of the museum, in a building belonging to Assis Chateaubriand’s Diarios Associados. Lina also designed the first folding, stackable chair for the museum in plywood and canvas, followed by another in leather and jacaranda wood. The work was not entirely unfamiliar to her. Following her arrival in Milan from Rome at the beginning of 1940, Lina, alongside the architect Carlo Pagani, worked in publishing, specializing in furnishings for prestigious magazines directed by the architect and designer Gio Ponti. She worked for the magazine Lo Stile from the first issue in January 1941 until July 1943. For the 21st edition in 1942, Bo and Pagani compiled a feature on furnishings for an apartment that they had renovated and, in the following issue, a “child’s room”. The article included not only design ideas but it also contained photos of actual furnishings. During the same period, Bo and Pagani also worked together on the Mondadori women’s magazine Grazia, with a weekly column, “La casa”, where they reviewed furnishing themes and gave advice on creating comfortable rooms with little efforts. These were the war years, which necessitated simple solutions, using readily available or reusable materials. From 1943, Lina Bo and Carlo Pagani worked with Domus, where she became Deputy Director in 1944. From May 1945 to June 1946 they edited the Quaderni di Domus series on monographic furnishing themes.

The chair for the MASP auditorium was declared by Bardi to be the first modern chair in Brazil. In 1947, São Paulo was rapidly changing. Although not yet a city, it was garnering wealth from the coffee production and industrialization consolidated during the Second World War following restrictions on imported goods. As a consequence of this industrialization, a vast urbanization process was under way in the city creating intensive vertical growth. The photographer, Peter Scheier, captured images of the buildings under construction, taking the photos from below creating the effect of a metropolis as if it were New York. There were high expectations.
In the years before the war, many Europeans who emigrated their own countries following the imposition of racial laws chose to settle in São Paulo. After the war, there was intensive immigration up until the mid-fifties. Many cultivated professionals as well as skilled craftsmen came to São Paulo looking for opportunities in the ascending country.

The Museo opened on 2 October with a limited selection of artwork and an outstanding didactic exhibition on the history of art prepared by Studio d’Arte Palma, Roma, a gallery that P.M. Bardi opened in May 1944. Ahead of its time, the gallery comprised a scientific restoration laboratory, managed by partner Mario Modestini, a library, a conference and concert space. The studio became an institution, organizing antique and contemporary art exhibitions that served, in a nutshell, as the basis for the Museo de Arte São Paulo - yet on a larger scale.
Over the first few months of the museum opening, courses, conferences and temporary exhibitions by Brazilian artists were held, a novelty for the city, giving the museum a very lively, innovative air. Lina played an active role and, following on from the experimental chair for the museum, at the same time began to produce modern furniture.

Palma, Estúdio de Arte e Arquitetura

In August 1948, the Estúdio Palma was featured in Diario de São Paulo, positing Lina and the architect Giancarlo Palanti as directors of the Estúdio Palma in São Paulo, emulating its namesake in Rome. The article stated that Valéria Piacentini Cirell, who managed the antiquarian section, rounded out the organization. The company was already producing modern furniture which appeared alongside antique furniture and works of art in photographs published in the newspaper. The studio was situated on the eighteenth floor of a modern building, not far from the museum.
Giancarlo Palanti had arrived in Brazil at the same time as the Bardis, towards the end of 1946. He followed his fiancé, Lily Maggi, who had relatives in industry in São Paulo. He left behind the studio he had had in partnership with Franco Albini since 1931, and with whom he had worked on many architectural projects. Graduating from Politecnico University of Milan in 1929, he accumulated vast experience in the architectural sector and also in publishing, working with Casabella and Domus. His book, Mobili Tipici Moderni, was published in 1933 and contained furniture by 168 designers throughout the world. Together with Albini, he created furniture for the “Casa a struttura d’acciaio” at the V Triennale (1933) while in 1937 Palanti designed the overall architecture of Villa Tavani in Livorno, along with all the furniture and accessories.

The Bardis knew Palanti from Italy and invited him to work with them. The Palma, Estúdio de Arte e Arquitetura was registered on 3 January 1949, with Achillina Bo Bardi having almost all the share allocation and Pietro Maria Bardi, holding a small number of shares. When Lina and Palanti began working together in 1948 they mainly worked on the construction of plywood furniture using vertically cut sheets, rather than bent as in the style of Alvar Aalto. Although industrial production was planned they only achieved artisan output, even though the studio had a joinery company with modern machinery and a mechanical workshop. The joinery company, Paubra S.A. Moveis e Esquadrias, was registered at the São Paulo Chamber of Commerce on 26 October 1948. When the company was founded, in rua Iaiá in the Itaim Bibi district, there were three partners: Lina and Palanti held the same share allocation and a third partner, Emilio Bonalumi, also Italian, held a higher number of shares.

From the outset, Estúdio Palma worked for architects, such as Daniele Calabi, an Italian who had arrived before the war and Rino Levi, a Brazilian of Italian descent, who graduated in architecture in Rome in 1926. Up until 1950 the work designed by Lina and Palanti came under the auspices of Estúdio Palma without specifying the designer’s name. Most production is from the period between 1948 and 1949. These were years of happy creativity, evidenced by hundreds of sketches found in the Instituto Bardi Archives, an indication of how rapidly ideas flowed. At the end of 1949 Lina and Palanti withdrew from the Paubra company, which continued under Emilio Bonalumi and other partners at the same address until 1952, the year the company ceased trading. Another Paubra S.A. Moveis e Esquadrias company was set up at the end of 1952 in rua dos Missionarios, in the Santo Amaro district and lasted until 1970. The use of the same name created uncertainty about the attribution of the furniture but documents at the Instituto Bardi show that from 1950 Paubra no longer manufactured Estúdio Palma furniture, which was created specially by the Artesanal company and other suppliers.

Estúdio Palma furniture

The philosophy behind creating new furniture was to produce rational, simple and durable designs, in line with the new architecture and eliminating anything superfluous. These concepts had already been developed in Italy and were reiterated in Lina’s magazine articles, especially during the latter years of the war. In Brazil she and Palanti sought to manufacture furniture that referenced the culture of the country, taking into account the demands of a tropical climate. They chose plywood, almost always araucaria, lined with pau marfim or other Brazilian woods in beautiful shades. Plywood had the advantage of being a very durable material enabling a variety of shapes. Another characteristic feature was avoiding upholstery or limiting its thickness to solve the problem of high relative humidity with increased possibility of mildew. They therefore researched furniture with beautifully thick leather, rope, natural fibres or cushioned pieces with plastic materials. Some chairs could be dismantled, in particular those with external wooden joints making them easy to transport.

Types of furniture

Lists, often handwritten by Lina, show chairs, armchairs, sofas, tables and coffee tables, sun loungers, magazine racks, shelving and tea trolleys. Examining estimates, especially those that were approved, there are also desks, bar furniture, bedside tables, planters and furniture specially made on request such as wardrobes and beds. Lists identify various pieces with the letters C (cadeira), P (poltrone), M (mesa) etc., and the corresponding number. Attributing pieces to the individual designer, i.e. Lina or Palanti, occurred later, probably during 1950. However, it is not easy to establish exactly which piece was designed by whom, since the catalogue descriptions are generic and very similar. In addition, Lina no longer used the letters and numbers that originally corresponded to the names of the furniture. A subsequent, handwritten list contains 42 pieces of which 9 are by Giancarlo Palanti and the others by Lina, but we know that Palanti made at least 15 pieces. Furnishings were almost always requested for household use but in some cases for cinema and theatre lobbies or stores.

At the end of 1950, certain furnishings were featured in an article in the first edition of Habitat entitled “Moveis Novos”, with Palma, Estúdio de Arte e Arquitetura mentioned in the past tense, explaining production aims and particulars, based on “structural simplicity derived from the extraordinary beautiful grain and shades of Brazilian wood, as well as its durability and potential”. Photographs of the pieces featured clearly attribute the individual pieces to the appropriate designer. On the same page, the article (almost certainly written by Lina) reiterates the need for an architect’s intervention: “Whilst Brazilian architecture has developed considerably, the same cannot be said of the furniture. Architects, occupied with more urgent, frenzied construction in this country which is expanding with prodigious rapidity, do not have sufficient time to work on chairs. Such pieces require a technician, an architect, not a lady looking for distraction or an upholsterer, as many believe.”
Examining the approved estimates, it can be seen that some pieces became popular with the public, among these the stackable “museum type” chairs, armchairs and foldable seats and Lina’s very comfortable sun loungers.
The G-shaped rocking armchair was requested 3 or 4 times, hence its rarity, while the C12 chairs matching the dining table and P9 armchair designed by Palanti were more successful. At the end of 1950, the design of these two pieces was ceded to Carlo Hauner’s company Moveis Artesanal, which continued to produce them for a few more years. Palanti’s wooden armchair with buckled leather seat and back, together with coffee tables and sofas, was selected by the architect Rino Levi for the foyer of the Cultura Artistica theatre. A tea trolley designed by Lina was also in great demand as was a table with diagonal legs, produced in various sizes and often extendible. The desk whose legs have the same motif as Lina’s tea trolley, appears to be an on-request design and not part of the initial product catalogue. However, the catalogue included the Tripé armchair designed by Lina in cabreuva wood with a slung seat in thick canvas or leather that moulds to the body, inspired by hammocks used in northern Brazil. This was followed by a lightweight version in metal and leather. However, the catalogues do not include all the furniture sold or mentioned in the estimates, neither do the many drawings of this period include all the furniture created. Presumably some designs remained in the hands of the companies that manufactured the pieces.
The experimental and exceptionally innovative Estúdio Palma was part of a society that was changing, but not as much as the city. The bourgeoisie still chose stylish furniture, specially imported from France or copied from magazines, featuring excessive gilding, draping and opulent shapes. Introducing modern furniture was slow and very difficult.

From 1950 Lina applied for patents for some of the Estúdio Palma models, in particular for chairs and armchairs designed by her. She succeeded in receiving just one patent, for an auditorium armchair with a metal frame. The Instituto Nacional de Propriedade Industrial technicians however challenged the applications, in a decision lasting for years, citing the existence of similar designs. Indeed, when it appeared, Estúdio Palma furniture was much copied: << Furniture manufacturers, when they saw what we were producing, thought it was very easy to make a modern piece of furniture and they made the same pieces, although very badly. There was no legal protection. This created stress and also considerable economic loss. Zanine Caldas, who used to make my models (he also made models for Oscar) came to the office one day (I wasn’t there) and, looking at the cut wood (we used vertically cut plywood then), said to Palanti: “I’m going to make the same range.” >>

So, Estúdio Palma ceased trading. The main reasons were the copies, lack of legal protection, sales that probably did not cover costs, and also the two designers’ change of direction. In 1950 Lina created new pieces for the Museo which had expanded over 2 floors and had many students attending the courses. She also built the Vetrine das Formas and taught a design course at the Museo alongside artist and designer Roberto Sambonet, who was then in Brazil. Construction was also beginning on the Casa de Vidro in the Morumbi district. As for Palanti, he had already built an office building and was working on an apartment building. He worked with the construction company Alfredo Mathias from 1951. Lina and Palanti were two architects who first and foremost wanted to be architects.

After the Estúdio Palma experience, Lina continued to produce furniture but for her own house. This was furniture with steel structure such as beds, leather Bola chairs, and “the bowl”. The latter, featured in American and French magazines, was very successful but she again fell victim to technicians who judged the designs for granting patents, this time the American patent office, who were unable to recognize the inventions. In São Paolo, the company Ambiente, probably in relatively limited numbers, produced the finally patented Bowl with an aluminum inner shell.

Furniture for public spaces only

Lina no longer wanted to produce pieces for individuals. The only exception was the garden loungers with a steel frame, leather seat, and with unusual spring suspension that she produced for her friend Valéria Cirell, whose house she had built. Reminiscent of the Tripolina or Argentinian Butterfly, the frame is distinctive and ingenious. Recently, the Instituto Bardi has discovered an unmistakable design suggesting that the lounger was designed before her collaboration with Cirell, probably during the Estúdio Palma period.
In 1957, Lina designed the first idea for the Museo on avenida Paulista that would only be ready in 1968. From 1957 to 1964 she lived for extended periods in Salvador. A successful time, with many new experiences in a stimulating environment. She created the MAMB, Museo de Arte Moderna Bahia for which she designed the theatre’s armchairs and founded the Museo de Arte Popular in a building she restored, Solar do Unhão. In November 1963 she opened the Civilização do Nordeste exhibition, the result of a meticulous research into the heart of the Brazilian rural population and their traditions. The Museo de Arte Popular was to be complemented by a Documentation Centre and Technical Studies Centre, both based on the knowledge of useful objects created for survival in the north-east. Such archive was meant to support the Design School which Lina established with the intention to trigger the transition from primitive pre-artisanal to modern industry. Political events put an end to this era of euphoria and hope.
Lina returned to São Paolo, where she oversaw the construction of the Museo. She also devised furnishing details for the Museo on avenida Paulista, including glass easels used to display paintings, a circular piece of furniture for the reception, a meeting room table and office desks with glass tops resting on industrial steel drawers. All very robust but light, technical but elegant.

In 1967, she produced the Cadeira a bordo de estrada, a rustic chair, made of 3 branches and a trunk tied together with rope or lianas. A challenge perhaps, but also in defense of a section of the population that should not be forgotten, the deepest Brazil, far from the cities. The real Brazil, according to Lina. She also designed wooden armchairs for the new MASP theatre, which were never produced. The prototype is preserved in the Casa de Vidro.
The concept of these chairs would be reprised and created for the SESC - Pompéia theatre. A project that Lina devised in great detail, a sports and social center with a large social room for visitors to share regardless of age.
For this project, Lina created furnishings using pinus elliottii, a reforestation species, to make them very durable, which her friend, the chemical engineer Vinicio Callia, of the company Laminarco had long researched. This wood could be used when young, around 8 years old, treated and bonded with a secret chemical formula and was suitable for practical furniture for the general public. In addition to the theatre armchairs, the material was also used for sofas, armchairs, seats, fixed tables in the restaurant and children’s tables. It was a material she had already used for the MASP restaurant and which maintained its shape. In this particular case, the design’s shape respected the nature of the material and the material responded to aesthetic and practical demands.

Between 1976 and 1982, Lina designed Espírito Santos do Cerrado church in Minas Gerais and the Santa Maria dos Anjos chapel in Ibiúna, near São Paulo. Two examples of humble construction, yet with a sophisticated simplicity. For the Franciscan church in Minas Gerais, she devised a pulpit style chair, based on a design known to be used by priests, but in the end would be adopted for the faithful. The same chair was also used in the chapel. The two churches have since replaced the chairs with communal benches.

Research continues. Sometimes, queries arise about a piece, especially from the Estúdio Palma period, about which not everything is known. To grasp Lina’s ideas, her skillfulness, her intellectual honesty, it serves to refer to the words of P.M. Bardi, written in a note following Lina’s death: “For Lina designing a chair meant abiding by architecture. She emphasized the architectural aspect of a piece of furniture. She saw architecture in every object. I have always been aware and understood that, for Lina, design meant construction as in architecture.”
It is in this context that Lina’s and also Palanti’s designs should be viewed. They were two architects who “built”.