Lina Bo Bardi is a perfect example of how place can shape the direction of our work. She was also a rarity: a female architect making headway in the boy's club of mid-century modernism and an Italian making a mark on Brazilian design. She studied architecture in Rome under Marcello Piacentini, whose stripped classical buildings of the 1930s became emblematic of Mussolini's Italy. After graduating, she worked alongside Gio Ponti in Milan, whose elegant Pirelli Tower of the early 1950s would show how beautiful a skyscraper could be. So when she arrived in Brazil in 1946 with her husband, she brought with her a wealth of experience in European modernism.