Mid-century modern visionaries, Albert Frey and Lina Bo Bardi are exhibited together at the Palm Springs Art Museum for an unprecedented show of models, drawings, design objects, and photographs, opened this fall and will remain on exhibit through January 7, 2018.
The exhibit A Search for Living Architecture explores the shared belief of Albert Frey and Lina Bo Bardi, that architecture is a way to connect people, nature, building, and living. The mid-century show-stoppers are highlighted in the installation design by Bestor Architecture.
“The parallel odysseys of Frey and Bo Bardi represent the emergence of Southern California and Sao Paulo as architectural laboratories of the mid-20th century,” said Elizabeth Armstrong, the museum’s executive director. “Although they never met, this exhibition shows how they each embraced the social and environmental contexts specific to their adoptive homes.”
The exhibition experience begins with the case studies of four homes, the glass-walled structures Albert Frey and Bo Bardi designed for themselves, Frey II House in Palm Springs, and Bo Bardi’s Casa de Vidro in Sao Paulo. Two of which, Bo Bardi’s Cirell House and Frey’s Aluminaire House are scheduled to be assembled across from the Palm Springs Art Museum in a future downtown park.
A Search for Living Architecture was co-curated by the Palm SPrings Art Museum Director of art, Daniell Cornell and esteemed Bo Bardi scholar, Zeuler R. Lima. “Both Frey and Bo Bardi were interested in re-imagining architecture via the transformation of the modern house,” states Cornell. “Presented here together for the first time, these structures convey departure points for understanding the evolving concept of Living Architecture… As Frey and Bo Bardi embraced modern technologies, they responded to the climate and terrain of their respective environments, and the people whose lives were shaped by those conditions.”
Albert Frey and Lina Bo Bardi: A Search for Living Architecture is presented as part of Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA (PST: LA/LA), an extensive exploration of Latin American and Latino are in Los Angeles taking part in over 70 cultural institutions across Southern California, sponsored by the Getty Foundation.
