The curatorial team of the XII São Paulo International Biennial of Architecture, comprising architects Vanessa Grossman, Charlotte Malterre-Barthes, and Ciro Miguel, has been named a recipient of the competitive 2019 Grants to Individuals from the prestigious, Chicago-based Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. The grant was awarded for the publication of the book Todo dia/ Everyday, the result of the work and research that culminated in the theme of the XII São Paulo International Biennial of Architecture. The bilingual volume will be published by Ruby Press, a Berlin-based publisher specializing in books on architecture, art, and other cultural practices engaged in the production of space in contemporary society.
ArchDaily is continuing our partnership with Radical Pedagogies, an ongoing multi-year collaborative research project led by Beatriz Colomina with a team of PhD students of the School of Architecture at Princeton University, presenting a series of paradigmatic cases in architectural education. In this fourth example of Radical Pedagogies in Latin America, Vanessa Grossman (PhD Candidate in History and Theory of Architecture at Princeton University) presents Lina Bo Bardi's application for a chair at the Faculty of Architecture and Urban Studies of the University of São Paulo. Although the application was rejected by the faculty commission, the submitted essay still is a singular source of new ideas for architectural education.
"We performed hitherto a sort of tour throughout time and throughout the “theories” of architecture, dwelling upon one of the aspects and modes of interpretation: the critical aspect. But the experience of teaching has led us to assume, among students, a certain impatience. This impatience we know very well: it means that we no longer feel the sap flowing from the past, that we have almost constitutionally “cut the roots,” that the natural habit of a calm and methodical study no longer exists, despite the consciousness of an acquired cultural heritage. It is the impatience of those who no longer want to know things that do not produce a result soon, of things that do not serve solutions to the problems of immediate life."
—Lina Bo Bardi, Introduction to “Problems of Method,” the second and final chapter of Propaedeutic Contribution to the Teaching of Architecture Theory (1957) [p. 45 in the 1992 Brazilian edition].