Lina Bo Bardi, In Her Own Light

Lina Bo Bardi treated concrete the way other architects treat glass — as something to be made weightless, lifted, opened. Her great museum in São Paulo hangs its galleries from two scarlet beams and gives the ground back to the city as a public square.

She arrived in Brazil in 1946 and spent the rest of her life unlearning the Europe she had been trained in. Buildings, she came to believe, were not finished until people had worn them in.

Freedom, she wrote, is the hardest thing to design. You can only leave room for it.

That room — the unprogrammed space, the wide stair, the shaded undercroft — is her real subject. Decades on, her buildings remain among the few that seem genuinely glad to be used.