This text by architect Lina Bo Bardi voices a criticism of the resolutions made at the XII Congress of Architecture (Madrid, 1975), targeting the vision of the notion of the collective and “social commitments” as a betrayal of the modern movement. According to Bo Bardi, it is a backward notion to attempt to make industrial design the force of social regeneration since it has become the great symbol of the perversity of the production system. The idea of the regenerative power of art is a utopian ideal that has been transformed into a mistaken brand of urbanism supported by the technocratic intelligentsia. Bo Bardi advocates the need to oppose this process, which she calls “environmental planning.” She instead proposes the reintegration of urbanism, architecture, industrial design, and other cultural expressions in order to act on socioeconomic reality not for the sake of the aesthetic, but for the sake of the political.

In the early fifties, Lina Bo Bardi (née Achillina Bo, 1914–92), an Italian architect who lived in Brazil, directed the art magazine Habitat, published by the Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP). In 1951, she and her husband, Pietro Maria Bardi (1900–99), the curator and director of MASP, began at the museum the industrial design department Instituto de Arte Contemporânea (IAC), where she taught. On the basis of Bauhaus principles, that school, which was in operation from 1951 to 1953, envisioned industrial designers as crucial professionals in the industrial age insofar as they were responsible for the visual identity of modern societies.

In this document, Bo Bardi openly criticizes the resolutions made by consensus at the XII Congress of Architecture that took place in the Spanish capital in 1975. She considers the resolutions a betrayal of the basic principles of modernism. In her view, architecture and design have veered towards consumerism and technocracy. Within this context, she believes that modernism necessitates a re-examination of the situation in Brazil insofar as its culture makes “a stale contribution that is difficult to digest.” During those years of military dictatorship (1964–85), the government was in the hands of General Ernesto Geisel (1974–78). Although he was nationalistic, his political vision, known as “responsible pragmatism,” was somewhat open to international influences, and still based on the supposed “economic miracle.” A decade after her frustrating experience in Bahia as the director of the Museu de Arte Moderna da Bahia (MAMB) and the Museu de Artes Populares (MAP), Bo Bardi came to believe that it was impossible to use crafts as an antidote for industrialization. In her words, crafts never existed “as [a] social body” in Brazil. She asserts instead that it is necessary to begin with a new social reality by making anthropological use of “aesthetically negative things” once art has become a political operation.