How to change the world of living from an early age, reading

Zoboli: Our relationship with Ángela León began thanks to Guido Scarabottolo who years ago showed me some drawings for a fantastic guide to the city of São Paulo, made by an extraordinary hand. I believe that people who know how to draw architecture, landscapes and faces in a very fluid way are also the best at knowing how to narrate them. I was really impressed by them. Our collaboration with Ángela began with a book published in partnership with the Musei Fiorentini for our Piccola Pinacoteca Portatile series; a book on the colour green in art. Shortly after that, Ángela came up with a proposal for a project on the life and figure of Lina Bo Bardi, who, entirely coincidentally, I had just discovered. Ángela’s work on Lina sparked a format that then also proved ideal for telling the stories of other exceptional women, such as Charlotte Perriand and Gertrude Jekyll. In England, Jekyll is something of a national treasure: the English garden as we know it today is almost entirely down to her. She was also an exceptional writer on the subjects of gardening and nature, to which much of the British love for plants, animals and the landscape can be ascribed. 

Zoboli: It’s interesting that Ángela decided to start from the roots and the childhoods of these women, and also that at the beginning it’s not just them as children but also the context in which they grew up. As if to say: we have been born and we absorb everything, and we are able, through creativity, to change the world into which we have arrived. All three of these girls had genuine enlightenments in childhood. When Charlotte went into hospital to have her appendix removed, she discovered the beauty of white walls, empty spaces, essential for a hospital, and fell in love; Lina couldn’t wait to be older and have adventures; Gertrude discovered nature, invented names for plants and, after she and her family escaped to the country to get away from a highly polluted London, she became a wild child, roaming alone through the countryside and making friends with the animals she encountered. She would later experience other great passions, like painting, which she had to give up because of problems with her eyesight, but she went back to nature and discovered her greatest talent, the ability to create gardens. What these three figures have in common is the idea of nature as a central element from which to draw inspiration and measure themselves against in order to build architecture, milieus, internal and external spaces, and their passion for the creativity of artisans, work done by hand, techniques. These two aspects weave a common thread into a collective story.   

León: I’m now working on a new book on Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky. Like the other three, she too was an extremely creative and courageous woman, who took unconventional and risky decisions, not just as regards the way she worked, but also the way she lived. They all had a very particular sensitivity towards aspects of the world around them, such as nature, ways of life and social justice. They are all highly inspiring.