A gigantic green ball is on the loose, being herded around by a gang of schoolchildren, who gleefully speed it towards a circle of squishy foam animals, crashing into a projector hanging from the ceiling along the way. Other kids leap between the vinyl-covered creatures, hopping from turtle to tiger, while one boy begins rodeo-riding a seal. In the room next door, another class hurtles themselves down a series of glossy red slides that radiate from a stepped podium, while others are busy with scraps of gold leaf, taking turns to jump up and stick their sparkling fingerprints on the walls of the Nottingham Contemporary.
This is exactly the kind of merry mayhem that the modernist architect Lina Bo Bardi imagined when she drew an illustration of the public piazza of her Museum of Art in São Paulo (Masp) in 1968. At the height of Brazil’s repressive military dictatorship, she pictured a world of innocent play, where children clambered over rainbow carousels, crawled through tubes and slid down the red ribbon-like slides of her “practicable sculptures” – which never saw the light of day.
