Bo Bardi collaborated (until 1943) with architect and designer Giò Ponti on the magazine Lo Stile – nella casa e nell’arredamento.

[5] In 1942, at the age of 28, she opened her own architectural studio on Via Gesù, but the lack of work during wartime soon led Bardi to take up illustration for newspapers and magazines such as Stile, Grazia, Belleza, Tempo, Vetrina and Illustrazione Italiana.

In 1945, Domus commissioned Bo Bardi to travel around Italy with Carlo Pagani and photographer Federico Patellani to document and evaluate the situation of the destroyed country.

Bo Bardi, Pagani and Bruno Zevi established the weekly magazine A – Attualità, Architettura, Abitazione, Arte in Milan (A Cultura della Vita).

MASP (the São Paulo Museum of Art) was established on 2 October, with temporary offices on the second floor of the headquarters of the Diários Associados on Rua Sete de Abril.

[4] In 1950, Bo Bardi and fellow Italian immigrant Giancarlo Palanti re-designed the MASP museum space in the Diários Associados building, shifting away from Beaux-Arts-style interiors with paintings backed by curtained walls, towards exhibition design rooted in interwar avant-garde artistic practices such as the work of El Lissitzky, the Deutscher Werkbund, and Franco Albini.

[11] Bo Bardi became a naturalized Brazilian citizen in 1951, the same year she completed her first built work, her own "Glass House" in the new neighborhood of Morumbi.

In August 1940 Bo Bardi partnered with Carlo Pagani in an unbuilt project titled 'Casa sul mare di Sicilia' in a special issue of the magazine Domus.

[19] In 1951 Bo Bardi designed the "Casa de Vidro" (“Glass House”) to live with her husband in what was then the remnants of the Mata Atlantica, the original rain forest surrounding São Paulo.

[7] Located on a 7,000-square-metre plot of land, it was one of the first three residences in the Morumbi neighborhood, along with Oswaldo Bratke's studio house and his project for Oscar and Maria Luisa Americano.

In addition to being her first built project, this building was also Bo Bardi's first attempt at finding a Brazilian language for the Italian modernism that she had been trained in.

In the house, there are zones allocated to different functions- a dining room, a library, and a sitting area around the freestanding fireplace- but all are unified by the forest views through the glass.

The open midsection of the building left the plaza open to Avenida Paulista, São Paulo's main financial and cultural avenue, and left the site unobstructed to the views of the lower-lying parts of the city, which was one of the conditions given by the local legislation when Bo Bardi received the commission for this project[25] Paintings were hung on individual sheets of glass set in rough-hewn concrete blocks – called "crystal easels" – and arranged in a rough grid in the MASP Pinacoteca.

It was founded by Lina Bo Bardi after an invitation by the governor of Bahia to direct a new art museum in the North East of Brazil.

[28] Bo Bardi wanted this museum to show primitive art from the North East of Brazil, as well as the practical nature of their designs.

[1][8]The site was a former steel drum and refrigerator factory in São Paulo, and was to be redeveloped into a leisure and recreation center for the working class.

SESC is a Brazilian non-governmental organization linked to national unions, created in the 1940s to provide workers with health services and cultural activities.

[1] After a site visit in the early stages of the project, Bo Bardi realized that locals and former factory workers were already using the existing structure as a social gathering space and a place for football, dance groups, and theater.

Rough windows were knocked out of the factory walls and covered with bright red sliding screens attached inside.

After the completion of her Glass House project, Bo Bardi and her four staff members met around the open fireplace in lieu of a dedicated office and collaborated there.

In 1977, Bo Bardi moved her studio into a shipping container unit on the grounds of the SESC Pompéia site where it remained for nine years.

It was common to see construction tools and hard hats littering her workspace as she was just as interested in the techniques and skills rooted in building as she was the poetics of her designs.

Bo Bardi's office never had a secretary to handle administrative duties, nor did they make a habit of producing "standard" technical drawings and plans for construction.

[36] Bo Bardi produced more than six thousand drawings most of which are stored in her personal archives in the house she designed for herself and her husband in São Paulo.

[37] Zeuler R. Lima, Lina Bo Bardi's biographer, dedicated two books and two exhibitions to the study of her drawings (see external links below).

She would display multiple spatial frameworks simultaneously, but never losing sight of the aspects of daily life, which she revealed gracefully, in colorful detail.

Over the past years, numerous artists and architects including Gilbert & George, Cildo Meireles, Isaac Julien, Cristina Iglesias, Norman Foster, Olafur Eliasson, and Adrián Villar Rojas have created works in homage to Lina Bo Bardi.

[39] In 2013, curator Hans Ulrich Obrist mounted the exhibition “The Insides are on the Outside”, set at the Casa de Vidro and at SESC Pompeia.

Gilbert & George spent a day at the Glass House as living sculptures, documenting the results with postcards to be distributed to visitors.

[42] In 2018, Nilufar Gallery, in collaboration with Space Caviar, supported by Instituto Bardi Casa de Vidro, presented the largest collection of Lina’s furniture ever brought together, at Fuorisalone Milan Design Week.