The Power Station of Art is presenting The Poetics of Survival, the inaugural solo exhibition on the Chinese mainland dedicated to Italian-Brazilian architect Lina Bo Bardi (1914-1992).

The exhibition is a key project of the China-Brazil Year of Culture. It also marks the first time that PSA's architecture and city series, launched in 2014, has featured a female architect.

Born in Rome, Bo Bardi moved to Brazil in 1946, where she built a prolific career spanning architecture, design, curation, and publishing. In 2021, she was posthumously awarded the Special Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Architecture Biennale.

The exhibition showcases more than 300 items, including architectural models, drawings, sketches, historical photographs, and archival documents, tracing Bo Bardi's multidimensional practice.

Three key projects anchor the exhibition, each corresponding to a phase of her career: the Glass House, the Art Museum of Sao Paulo, and the SESC Pompeia cultural and leisure center.

The Glass House, her first project in Brazil, features transparent glass walls that make the house appear to float among the trees, creating a poetic dialogue between modernist design and the tropical landscape.

The Art Museum of Sao Paulo is known for its dramatic red structure and large span, which leaves the ground beneath it open as a public plaza. It remains one of Sao Paulo's most striking urban symbols.

In her late masterpiece, SESC Pompeia, Bo Bardi preserved the industrial traces of an old factory while introducing new elements, allowing everyday life to flourish amid the rugged concrete and transforming the complex into a gathering place for the public.

These three projects trace the evolution of her intellectual journey, from the transplantation of European modernism to the emergence of local consciousness, and ultimately to a mature practice rooted in everyday life and local wisdom.

If you go

When: July 25 to Oct 25

Where: Power Station of Art, No 678 Miaojiang Road, Huangpu district

Ticket price: 60 yuan ($8.89)

Sources: Power Station of Art, Huangpu district government