V–A–C Sreda online magazine presents a new three-month programme dedicated to air in art and culture. This issue is about Lina Bo Bardi, the Brazilian architect and designer of Italian origin whose works can be seen at GES-2 House of Culture from July to October, 2025.
We publish an excerpt from a text by Bo Bardi on the importance of staircases in architecture. Using the example of the Teatro Gregorio de Matos in Brazil, Bo Bardi reflects on her personal approach to creativity, the relationship between poetry and the structure of a building, and how form sets the movement of space.
Stairs have always fascinated men. The great city stairways, flight of stairs leading to thrones, to temples… are a fascinating element, and as an architect I have always been fascinated by ideas for a staircase. I have never considered a staircase to be a practical element, as a means for climbing from one level to another. In the Unhão, for example, there is a staircase that is remarkable in Bahia. This goes along with my previous statement. Still in Bahia, in the design I am preparing for the Gregório de Mattos Theater and Foundation, there is a requirement for a staircase leading from the ground floor to the upper floor. As the design is very simple, and the atmosphere is to be the simplest, although noble, I needed an element to provide a fundamental point of interest for such a bare environment.
So we designed a staircase. For me, personally, as an architect, architecture is structure. I mean the structure of a building is raised to the level of poetry, as part of the esthetics. There is no difference whatsoever. An architect should design structures as he designs architecture, in the domestic sense of the word. Well, when I thought about the staircase, I thought about a structure that would be slightly different, that is, a supporting part and a supported part, like a piece of paper folded, that is, the stair steps. The idea for an inclined beam came to me from a great structure which I have admired ever since I was a student of architecture. This is the Nervi structure, in the stairways of the Berta Stadium in Florence. But this one is quite different. Here there is a central body, which is a pillar, with a beam pratically embracing the pillar, with brackets branching out of it like fish bones. Over this fundamental structure which is the supporting part of the staircase, the staircase is placed like a folded strip of paper, in which the folds are the steps.
The free design of this folded paper strip forms, from below, an invitation. Well, I like invitations. Since I was a child I have always admired them. Now they are not used anymore. I think the results will be rather good.
This is the structural part, and there is no other part: from the structure springs the architecture.