From 25 July to 25 October 2026, Shanghai’s Power Station of Art (PSA) will host the first exhibition in China dedicated to the work of Brazilian architect Lina Bo Bardi. Titled “The Poetics of Survival,” the exhibition was curated by Renato Anelli, and the display was designed by OPEN Architecture in a 2,300 m² space of the PSA contemporary art museum in Huangpu. The objective was to design “a stage where the audience gets a glimpse of the everyday reality of Brazil in Lina’s time” through a journey across the architect’s work and layered persona. The exhibition is not described as a retrospective, but as an “encounter with the master’s poetics of survival,” a late-20th-century concept describing how creative work becomes a tool to endure trauma such as historical oppression or extreme crisis. The concept serves as a common thread linking the reality portrayed and contemporary observers of a body of work “informed by her ingenuity, versatility, and generosity.”
The exhibition starts with a replica of the indoor pond at SESC Pompéia, installed in the lobby of PSA. In the original version, the pond embodies the São Francisco River, which runs across Brazil, replicated for this exhibition at its original scale. In the PSA gallery, it is not embedded into the ground as it is at SESC Pompéia, but appears to levitate slightly above the ground surface. The bottom of the pool is covered with pebbles of various sizes. The pool is equipped with four water outlets in the ceiling that continuously supply water through gentle dripping, creating rippling reflections across the water’s surface while compensating for water lost to evaporation.
Thematically, the exhibition design weaves together the multiplicity of Lina’s design practice, ideas, and personal life. The main body of the exhibition is organised around a single continuous curve that unfolds through the rectangular ground-floor gallery, using natural linen to define a sequence of distinct yet interconnected exhibition spaces, with rectilinear display cases placed around it. The linen fabric, a single continuous element, defines nine zones that bring together various media and modes of presentation, including drawings, sketches, models, photographs, and videos, while highlighting Lina’s seminal projects encompassing architecture, furniture, set design, folk art, and writing. The use of linen was chosen to echo the qualities of Lina’s practice. An unadorned, lightweight, adaptable, reusable material with earthy qualities, it was selected for its weight, drape, translucency, and capacity to receive projections. All exhibition texts are silkscreen-printed directly onto the linen.
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Architectural models and most of the other exhibits are distributed throughout the gallery as freestanding islands, while large-scale projections are caught by the curved linen surfaces. To keep the space immersive, the openings along the route are positioned at the centre of each enclosed section, gently lifting the linen so visitors can pass through the curtains into a different section of the exhibition. The space is warmly lit with extensive overhead and wall-washing lighting fixtures to highlight the exhibits, while keeping the focus away from the supporting structures to lend the objects a sense of suspension. Some of the furniture and ancillary pieces were custom-designed by OPEN, including the Beam Bench and the display cabinets. The divider marking the ticketed zone in the museum lobby was created by combining Lina’s concrete base for glass display panels with the red wood latticework from SESC Pompéia; the rocks used in the pond were also used as weights anchoring the linen fabric; plywood strips were assembled into display platforms for models and furniture; and rebars were folded into brackets to replace the distance barriers commonly seen in museums.
What makes Lina’s work so unique is that its diversity, vitality, and social engagement offer a vivid lens into the time and place she inhabited. Deeply devoted to Brazil’s society and culture, Lina dissolved the boundaries between observation and creation, transforming her lived experiences into works that continue to resonate with immediacy. On the other hand, presenting Lina’s work within a setting that is informed by her own design ethos and sensibility allows audiences to encounter not only her work, but also to get a sense of the world that inspired it. — OPEN Architecture, exhibition designers
Other architecture exhibitions currently on view worldwide include Architects of Liberation: Modernism in Western Africa at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, on view through 2 January 2027. The exhibition examines African modern architecture from the late 1950s through the early 1980s in the context of political independence in the region. The Jardí Botànic de Barcelona is hosting “Parlour Gardens: Dreams from the Rooftop,” a display of ceramic installations by 14 global landscape architects proposing a journey through landscape architecture, running through 4 October 2026. The Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) is presenting “The Fortune of the City Is That It Has Never Been Perfect,” an exhibition dedicated to the urban work of Portuguese architect Álvaro Siza, on view until 10 January 2027. Until 19 August, Aedes in Berlin is showcasing the exhibition “A Structure of Feeling: On a New Generation of Architects in China,” featuring the work of nine practices represented in 12 projects transforming the existing urban fabric, rural development, and contemporary forms of spatial production.
