Physical violence against women and the fact that abortion is illegal are perhaps the most visible aspects of what it’s like to be a woman in Brazil today.
     Figures for violence are quite high throughout the federal states, especially for domestic violence, i.e. that perpetrated by husbands. The measures designed to combat physical aggression may not be completely efficient but the reporting figures are on the rise (which is also a major success).
     In a country with such a large slice of the population living on low income, the sheer number of (illegal) abortions makes the issue a public health problem. Everybody in Brazil knows of some woman, who, not having the means to pay for a private clinic, has experimented with the most frightening pregancy termination methods, such as self-medication or some form of self-inflicted violation, which can result in terrible consequences for the babies in the (frequent) cases where the abortion is “unsuccessful”.
     However, when we consider architecture, the scenario is favourable to women.
     I am not particularly appreciative of gender issues when they are applied to characterising the feminine in the diverse professions where women have gained prominence. But, when considering the professional and social conquests of women, the inauguration of the first female President of the Republic of Brazil on 1 January this year was just reason for great emotion. A woman who is a former guerrilla, who fought in her youth against the military dictatorship. Her inaugural speech hit the right note, in my view, when discussing women’s issues, without overstating the matter.
     The number of women creating good-quality architecture in Brazil is on the increase, now reaching expressive figures. But it is tiny when compared to the number of female students in the schools of architecture (which seems to be a phenomenon common to a number of countries).
     In reflecting on the contribution of women to Brazilian architecture I would like to recall two names: Lina Bo Bardi and Carmen Portinho (the latter having trained as an engineer, not an architect).
     Carmen Portinho will be no stranger to anyone who is acquainted with the important developments in Brazilian architecture. Her name is generally associated with two designs by the architect Affonso Eduardo Reidy (who was Carmen’s life partner for many years): the Pedregulho complex and the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro, which are indeed two of the most important works of modern Brazilian architecture.
     In 1947 Ms Portinho set up and headed the Department of Popular Housing (DHP) at Rio de Janeiro City Council. The Department’s most important achievement was Pedregulho, a famous project designed by Reidy, who was working as a Council architect at the time. After a period spent in England at the end of the Second World War, she returned to Brazil, determined to put her newly-acquired experience in the field of social housing and urban planning to good use, taking the discussion of the public policies in this field to a new level. Of the many other exemplary projects carried out by the DHP, Francisco Bolonha’s design for Paquetá and the Marquês de São Vicente complex (also designed by Reidy) are also worthy of note.
     Carmen Portinho became Director of the Museum of Modern Art in 1951. She decided early on that the museum should receive its own building (at the time it was installed in the iconic Ministry of Education and Health building). The chosen site was the Flamengo embankment (Burle Marx and Reidy) facing Guanabara Bay. Ms Portinho remained Director of the MAM for 15 years and played a fundamental role in monitoring execution of the new museum building, a complex project with a daring reinforced concrete structure that began on what was still effectively wetland. “Building the MAM was one of the most fascinating chapters of my career, at the same time an adventure and an achievement that involved us all”.¹
     These were indeed landmark moments in the history of Brazilian architecture. But beyond these, Carmen Portinho also had a grandiose public life. While she is very well known to the cognoscenti, there can be no doubt that dissemination of her life work is not commensurate with her importance (despite the two books published on her life).²
     Ms Portinho was a militant feminist. She took up the cause of the vote for women in Brazil in the 1920s. In 1930, together with the feminist (and zoologist), Bertha Lutz, she was received by the Brazilian president, Getúlio Vargas, where she once again argued the case for universal suffrage. This was followed by the New Electoral Code of 1932, which guaranteed the right to vote and the right to hold office in the Executive and Legislature to women.
     Carmen Portinho graduated in Engineering from the Polytechnic School of the University of Brazil in Rio in 1926, as only the third woman to complete engineering studies in the country. She had an intense professional career. On her graduation day she was invited by the sponsor of her graduation class, the then Mayor of Rio, Alaor Prata, to work for the council.
     Four years later Ms Portinho enrolled in the first urban planning course in Brazil at the Federal District University’s Institute of the Arts. She took pride in saying she was the first female Brazilian urban planner. The Institute brought together a number of leading artists and intellectuals in the country (Heitor Villa-Lobos, Cândido Portinari, Mário de Andrade and Sérgio Buarque de Holanda, amongst others)³. The subject chosen by Ms Portinho for her final thesis, The Preliminary Design for the Future Capital of Brazil in the Central High Plain, is very much illustrative of the type of issues she concerned herself with and, above all, her ability to be on the cutting edge of debate. Brazil had already decided in the late 19th century on moving the capital to the Central High Plain but this was the first time the question was approached in modern urban planning terms: “We were still two decades away from the final planning of the new capital under Juscelino Kubitschek and Carmen Portinho was already studying the proposal in the light of the new urbanistic propositions of Le Corbusier.”⁴
     In 1932, Ms Portinho was involved in setting up the Revista municipal de engenharia [Municipal Engineering Magazine], an important vehicle for disseminating projects and debate on architecture and modern urban planning. The magazine also published her thesis on the new capital. That same year she travelled to the north-east of the country as part of a commission monitoring works to combat droughts. 
     In 1963 the pioneering ESDI (Higher Institute of Industrial Design) was founded in Rio de Janeiro. It was the first industrial design school in Latin America. Under the military dictatorship in Brazil, Ms Portinho became director of the ESDI in 1967. She had already been involved in creating industrial design-related courses when she was director of the MAM, an involvement she herself attributed to the influence of Max Bill, whom she befriended when he visited Rio. “It was Max Bill who suggested turning the visual arts school into a technical or industrial design school along the lines of the Ulm School, with which he was closely involved.”⁵
     She faced serious difficulties in the early years in office at the ESDI, both in terms of curricular and pedagogic disputes and political pressures. However, the 20 years she spent at the ESDI were decisive for its consolidation. In this period she organised important events, bringing to the school leading figures such as Hélio Oiticica, Haroldo de Campos, Vittorio Gregotti, Pierre Cardin and Umberto Eco.
     One could run up a long list of other work and important achievements by Carmen Portinho. For example, she was a member of the Brazilian Federation for Progress for Women, becoming its vice-chairwoman. She was co-founder of the Union of Female University Students (1932), which played an important role in bringing women into the universities. And in 1937 she was involved in setting up the Brazilian Association of Female Engineers and Architects. The list goes on and on.
     But it is perhaps more worthwhile recalling an episode recounted by the engineer herself, a curiosity in the history of modern architecture: it was Carmen Portinho who showed the final project for the Ministry of Education and Health (Rio de Janeiro) to Le Corbusier for the first time when she was in Paris in 1945 after having left the UK. Le Corbusier, despite having provided initial consultancy services, was not able to accompany the development of the project from Europe (at war)⁶. “His first reaction when he studied the documents was one of rage [...] ‘I have never in practice been able to do what these boys in Brazil have done – a building following my principles’.”⁷ A statement that reveals the pioneering aspect of modern Brazilian architecture, Le Corbusier’s strong influence in Brazil and, at the same time, the architect’s personality.
     The feminist Carmen Portinho was born in Cuiabá, Mato Grosso and died in Rio de Janeiro in 2001 at the age of 98.
     Lina Bo Bardi, who is generally recognised as the greatest female figure in Brazilian architecture, was, as is common knowledge, born in Italy (she is a naturalised Brazilian). It is interesting that, while it is not so easy to identify the feminine in her work, its Brazilian-ness is quite evident.
     The Glass House, a design from 1951, perhaps already reveals a proximity to the architecture that was asserting itself in Brazil. On the basis of generalised modern architecture precepts, such as the use of pilotis and a glass-fronted suspended volume, the house is radically immersed in a natural setting – seeking almost a fusion, an intertwining of the natural and the built. Here she perhaps revealed the influence of the Farnsworth House, but also she was also establishing a dialogue with other developments that were taking place in particular Brazilian form: in Pampulha, Ibirapuera Park (Niemeyer), Guinle Park (Lucio Costa) and later, and more expressively, in examples such as the Canoas House, Cavanelas and the Caracas Museum (also by Niemeyer) and the MAM in Rio de Janeiro itself.
     One of the first things Lina Bo Bardi did in Brazil was to found an architectural magazine for publication of modern designs in 1950. Habitat magazine became an important vehicle for establishing modern architects in São Paulo. It had a particularly memorable issue devoted to public schools belonging to what was known as the School Agreement [Convênio Escolar].
     At a time when Brazilian architecture was beginning to find its own mode of expression in large reinforced concrete structures, Lina Bo Bardi designed the São Paulo Art Museum (MASP) in 1957: a glass block suspended from four concrete beams with a free span of 74 metres. This was architecture that was created in a close relationship between architects and engineers (or engineer-architects), leading to the establishment of a tradition and state-of-the-art technology in construction with reinforced concrete in Brazil. The structure as the protagonist in a design project is, without question, a feature of Brazilian architecture that marked, in differing but equally authentic ways, the work of a number of architectural greats, such as Oscar Niemeyer, Affonso Eduardo Reidy, Vilanova Artigas and Paulo Mendes da Rocha.
     The involvement of the engineer Figueiredo Ferraz in the MASP project was decisive. He had been developing a new pre-stressed concrete technology that was to be internationally patented later. The presence of the beams on the upper layer of contract contracts with the slenderness of the lower layer of concrete, suspended above the structure of the base level. The great span of the MASP building frees up the ground so that the pre-existing belvedere overlooking a characteristic green axis in São Paulo, the Saracura Valley, could be preserved. To those looking up from the valley below, the base of the MASP appears to be a built rocky slope. The glass box, which defines the exhibition space, seeks to open up its treasures to the city, a proposal that becomes even more radical with the use of the famous glass supports used to display the works of art.
     The MASP design today no longer exists as an integral unit. Successive managements, particularly recent ones, have disfigured the design, not just in architectural terms but also, and above all, in museological terms. The radicalness of Lina Bo Bardi’s design has been replaced by a mimicking of what would actually be its antithesis. The free span that had earned the praise of John Cage – “It is the architecture of freedom”⁸ – is no longer free.
     In 1958 Lina Bo Bardi spent a season in the state of Bahia, and there came into contact with a group of artists seeking to set up a new artistic vanguard in Salvador, including the musicians, Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil and Torquato Neto and the film-maker, Glauber Rocha, “the first Bahian to explode onto the world”⁹.
     In 1956 she founded the Bahia Museum of Modern Art. The following year she designed the sets and costumes for the Threepenny Opera (B. Brecht and K. Weill) and later for a production of Camus’ Caligula. In 1962 she accompanied the shooting of Deus e o diabo na terra do Sol under Glauber Rocha’s direction in the Bahian backwoods.
     Ms Bo Bardi took an interest in Afro-Brazilian culture and the handicrafts of north-eastern Brazil. She organised exhibitions, wrote texts and designed furniture, incorporating this universe into her architecture in a very particular way. For this reason her work is divided into before and after Bahia phases. Of her work in this phase, one can highlight, amongst other projects, the Solar de Unhão (1962), and later, when she returned to Bahia, the Ladeira da Misericórdia housing development (co-designed with the architect, Lelé, 1987).
     But perhaps Bo Bardi’s iconic work in this phase is the SESC Pompéia Factory (São Paulo, 1977). Here she brought together a programme that mixed culture, leisure and sports in a kind of citadel, organised by a street that connects the storage sheds of an old steel drum factory to new concrete towers, which house the sports activities. The design draws its strength from the tension between the new buildings and the old sheds, from the construction of a new urban and natural landscape, and from the relationships between the horizontal buildings and the verticality of the towers. They possibly recall the image of the coastal mountains, Serra do Mar, the rocky feature that defines the landscape of a large stretch of the Brazilian coast and left an impression on the gaze of Lina, which can also be read in her famous description of her arrival in Rio de Janeiro, the modern construction against the backdrop of the forest that climbs the hills. “It is as if it were a new discovery of America [...], a contemplation that preserved her work ad momentum”, the architect Paulo Mendes da Rocha observed¹⁰. In the SESC Pompéia building one can say that the pre-existing is not limited to the old sheds, but includes the two concrete towers, which together reflect a primeval image of the Brazilian landscape.
     Considering Lina Bo Bardi’s vast contribution to architecture, it is difficult to define the importance of the feminine in her work. She did not have children, she lived a marriage of convenience and never had to depend on her work to live a life of comfort. She maintained that the word architect did not have a feminine version and reacted badly when she was referred to as a female architect.|

¹ Nabil Bonduki. Affonso Eduardo Reidy. São Paulo : Blau; Instituto Lina Bo e P. M. Bardi, 2000, p. 172.

² Carmen Portinho. Por toda a minha vida: depoimento a Geraldo Edson de Andrade. Rio de Janeiro : EdUERJ, 1999 and Ana Luiza Nobre. Carmen Portinho: o moderno em construção. Rio de Janeiro : Relume Dumará, 1999.

³ Cf. Ana Luiza Nobre. Op. cit.

⁴ Ibid. p. 27.

⁵ Carmen Portinho. Op. cit., p. 120.

⁶ The design of the Ministry was entrusted to a team of young architects (which included, amongst others, Affonso Reidy and Oscar Niemeyer) coordinated by Lúcio Costa.

⁷ Carmen Portinho. Op. cit., p. 97.

⁸ Lina Bo Bardi. Uma aula de arquitetura. in Silvana Rubino; Marina Grinover, (orgs). Lina por escrito: textos escolhidos de Lina Bo Bardi. São Paulo : Cosac Naify, 2009, p. 166.

⁹ Tales A. M. Ab’Saber. Lina, Bahia, Glauber. Caramelo. São Paulo : FAUUSP. Nº 4 (1992).

¹⁰ Paulo Mendes da Rocha. Imagem do Brasil. Caramelo. São Paulo : FAUUSP. Nº 4 (1992).