At home with Lina

During the 2013 Salone del Mobile, Arper has unveiled the re-edition of Bardi’s Bowl Chair, originally designed in 1951 by Lina Bo Bardi and now available in a limited and numbered series of 500 pieces.

Twenty years after her death, Lina Bo Bardi is still an unquestionable icon of modern architecture and her work is regarded as something of a bridge between different ideologies, geographies and ways of viewing the world. Like the dense vegetation that envelops her Casa de Vidro, or “Glass House”, in São Paulo’s Morumbi district — which, designed and built like Casa Bardi, is now the headquarters of the Lina Bo and P.M. Bardi Institute — the fertile and impetuous work of the Italo-Brazilian architect continues to grow over time, generating unexpected and appealing fruits.

One of these succulent design berries is the futuristic Bardi’s Bowl Chair. Designed in 1951, it looks like a piece from the latest Furniture Fair: a hemispherical seat simply sitting on a metal ring structure and supported on four legs. Initially it was part of the furniture made exclusively for the house, but now it is being issued for the first time by Arper. The chair’s production programme has been organised around a limited and numbered series of 500 pieces, intended for cultural and museum spaces, and it was conceived in close collaboration with the São Paulo-based institute.

Visual harmony and aesthetic

Now, more than ever, interior design is a balance of form and function, a dialogue between architecture, materials and finishes that transform and make the most of the space involved.