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"Although perhaps not universally known, the late Brazilian architect Lina Bo Bardi was a well-loved and influential force in tropical modernity and a champion of Brazilian artists. Arguably the best-loved of her works is the 1951 Casa de Vidro, or Glass House, of S\u00E3o Paulo. In its transparency and elegance it appears almost weightless; the glass expanse floats on stilts springing from a hillside, and like an inverted greenhouse, it\u2019s shrouded by jungle foliage. The Roman-born architect designed it for herself and husband Pietro Maria Bardi on the edge of the Mata Atl\u00E3ntica rainforest. Built only five years after she immigrated from Europe, its Corbusier-like pilotis and wrap-around glass seems to echo the remnants of her European sensibilities.The Glass House was Bo Bardi\u2019s first architectural work, and her death there in 1992 symbolically brought her life full-circle. While she lived, it was where the likes of Gi\u00F3 Ponti, Alexander Calder, John Cage, and Roberto Rossellini would gather, and beyond her death, its legacy as a meeting place for intellectuals continues. The second installment of&amp;nbsp;Hans Ulrich Obrist\u2019s&amp;nbsp;\u201CThe Insides Are on the Outside,\u201D the latest of his intimate in-house exhibitions, opens there today. &amp;nbsp;?Harkening back to his curatorial debut (which took place in his kitchen), Obrist has gathered 34 contemporary artists and architects for a group show of site-specific works, or \u201Cdiscrete interventions,\u201D that unfolded in two parts. In September, the exhibition\u2019s so-called \u201CPrelude\u201D featured works by Calder, Gilbert &amp;amp; George, and others: SANAA\u2019s Kazuyo Sejima, who paid homage to Bo Bardi\u2019s work during the 2010 Venice Architecture Biennale, designed a floating set of bookshelves that would better match the lightness of the house than the existing library. Additionally, as a reenactment of the Bardis\u2019 married life, Cildo Meireles installed a machine that periodically disperses a coffee smell and a recording of a voice very similar to that of &amp;nbsp;Bo Bardi\u2019s husband repeating,&amp;nbsp;\u201CLina, va fare un caff\u00E9.\u201D\u201CWhenever people went for dinner at the house and the conversation went to politics, [Pietro Bardi] would say \u2018Lina go make a coffee,\u2019\u201D Obrist explained. \u201CThey would always disagree on politics because he was much more right, and she was much more left.\u201DToday, additional works by the likes of Koo Jeong-a, Norman Foster, Pablo Le\u00F3n de la Barra, and others have been added. Olafur Eliasson, riffing on the title, has installed mirrors within the house to reflect the visible exterior. Nearby at Bardi\u2019s SESC Pomp\u00E9ia, a concrete factory converted to a multi-purpose cultural center, Dan Graham has built a pavilion on the roof, and Adrian Villar Rojas, Pedro Barateiro, Jos\u00E9 Celso Martinez Corr\u00EAa have installed videos featuring footage of the house.While the artists hail from wildly diverse backgrounds, generations, and aesthetics, what they have in common is an admiration for this house and Bo Bardi\u2019s legacy as an \u201Cartist\u2019s architect.\u201D They were either contemporaries of hers who knew her in real life, or had at one point or another mentioned her to Obrist as a source of inspiration. In the way that Obrist\u2019s 2008 \u201CEverstill\u201D exhibition in the Granada house of poet Federico Garc\u00EDa Lorca sought to connect art to poetry, the Glass House show is meant to connect art to architecture within a domestic space. And while Casa de Vidro serves as the location, it certainly doesn\u2019t serve as the backdrop. We spoke to Obrist about the artists\u2019 intentional interplay with the architecture, Bo Bardi\u2019s multi-disciplinary appeal, and how the works, like the house itself, \u201Cverge on the immaterial.\u201D &amp;nbsp;Many modernist houses stand alone as attractions, and I think we both agree that this house is a work of art in itself. What prevents these \u201Cdiscrete interventions\u201D from being distractions?You can come and see the exhibition or the house or both. Douglas Gordon made the title. That\u2019s his piece. Some [pieces] are present in the exhibition, but interventions like his or Cildo Meireles\u2019 are on the verge of the immaterial. The goal is not unsettling the house, or making it no longer readable, but bringing it back to life through the smell of coffee. The house is the protagonist when, after the protagonist dies, somehow the house is still there.When you work in a domestic space like this, what separates the act of curation from decoration?First of all, when an exhibition happens in a domestic space, the scale is very different and it produces more intimate works. It\u2019s not that the artists bring in works to decorate the house, but they work really in the context that they believe is necessary. Many of these works are contextual interventions. They add another layer. These houses are conceived as a Gesamtkunstwerk; artists play with the different functions and structural elements of such a house. It aims at subtlety. The house becomes a trigger, or production space.In the past, you\u2019ve called Bo Bardi an \u201Cartist\u2019s architect.\u201D Which of her attributes do artists most often mention as being influential?She\u2019s not only an artist\u2019s architect, she\u2019s also an architect\u2019s architect. Kazuyo Sejima always considered her to be a hero in terms of this idea of defying gravity. The weightless feeling of her architecture is almost immaterial. This house is hovering above the trees.[Bo Bardi\u2019s] blurring of the inside and outside is mentioned a lot, and so are her harmonies of light, geometries, the apparent weightlessness. There\u2019s also her thinking of art institutions. At the Museu de Arte de S\u00E3o Paulo alongside the Avenue Paulista, she did all these display experiments with glass features. Her SESC Pomp\u00E9ia is a favorite building of many artists. On the roof, Dan graham [built] his first outdoor pavilion in Brazil. He considers her a key inspiration.Norman Foster was probably the most surprising artist on the roster. What will he be doing?Norman Foster has never been to Brazil before this experience. There\u2019s a whole archive of Lina Bo Bardi drawings, so he\u2019s going to connect his daily practice of drawing to her daily practice of drawings. He also visited Oscar Niemeyer. Oscar was so delighted. They had known of each other, about each other for such a long time, but never had met.Obviously, creating site-specific works like these requires physically fitting them into the space. What kind of problems does that pose for the artists?The French collective Oulipo made a whole literature out of constraints. Constraints can be interesting for curating. In the Lina Bo Bardi house, it\u2019s very open. At the same time she was a great collector. It was fascinating how she accumulated a lot of objects, a lot of found elements which she brought into the house, of course in addition to her own designs. We start with her accumulation and artists respond to that. They\u2019re responding to her life, actually, with sound pieces, mirror pieces. It\u2019s not just hanging a drawing or painting on the wall; Juan Ara\u00FAjo\u2019s paintings on the dining room wall mirror the number of original works [the Bardis] had when they lived in the house.Each of these houses has extraordinary possibilities. The oscillation between inside and outside is one of the assets, or one of the great strengths, of this house that becomes a great vehicle for artists to produce work.Given your emphasis on intimacy, where does a little show like this fit into the big art scene? The trend seems to be towards filling entire atriums with one installation.&amp;nbsp;When I started curating in the late \u201980s and early \u201990s, the art world started to grow, and it started to be in more big venues. It\u2019s important that those exist. It\u2019s about diversity. But in some kind of way, there need to be different experiences or different spaces. The experience that I had at the very beginning in the kitchen should not be lost. It\u2019s always connecting to the first exhibition in some kind of way. We live in a context of globalization, and the danger is maybe the homogenizing effects of globalization are affecting work. If you look at 19th-century museums, you have big panorama-size rooms and then you have tiny little cabinets of work. That\u2019s something you shouldn\u2019t lose.&amp;nbsp;\u201CThe Insides Are on the Outside,\u201D organized in part by Brazilian retailer Iguatemi, runs through May 30.&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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