Aberto Returns to São Paulo With a Futurist “Ball House” at Its Center
A private residence that looks like it landed from a midcentury sci-fi daydream is becoming the unlikely anchor of São Paulo’s latest edition of Aberto, the exhibition series that opens hard-to-access Modernist homes to the public.
For its fifth edition, Aberto is unfolding across Casa Bola, a 135-square-meter dwelling built in the 1970s by the Brazilian architect and artist Longo, and an adjoining three-story warehouse that holds the main exhibition. Co-curator Kiki Mazzucchelli has described the house as “part Flintstones, part Jetsons” — a line that captures both its handmade eccentricity and its forward-looking ambition.
This year’s participating galleries include a strong contingent from Brazil: Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel, Mendes Wood DM, Luisa Strina, Nara Roesler, and Almeida & Dale. Gladstone Gallery — which operates in New York, Brussels, and Seoul — is joining Aberto for the first time.
Organizers say most of the works were newly commissioned, with the installations in Casa Bola chosen to echo the home’s bespoke, futuristic character. Because of the building’s tight footprint, Casa Bola is treated as an artwork in its own right, while the warehouse next door provides the volume needed for a fuller exhibition experience.
Inside, visitors encounter what Mazzucchelli calls a set of “contrasting organic and industrial characters,” with works by Daniel Steegmann Mangrané, Marina Simão, Leonor Antunes, Vivian Caccuri, and others. The mix is designed to play against the house’s idiosyncratic geometry and the warehouse’s more utilitarian architecture, creating a dialogue between crafted intimacy and infrastructural scale.
On the top floor, guest curator Fernando Serapião has assembled a focused presentation on Longo’s practice and on Casa Bola itself — the home he built in the 1970s and still inhabits. That material is placed in conversation with Pop-era works by Claudio Tozzi and Rubens Gerchman, which Mazzucchelli says evoke “the prevailing aesthetics in the years leading up to Casa Bola’s conception.” The historical thread then extends into contemporary responses to Longo’s experimental ethos, including an anthropomorphic sculpture by Marepe made from found aluminum pots and pans.
Longo originally imagined Casa Bola — literally, the “Ball House” — as a prototype for sustainable living. He constructed it with minimal material, incorporating debris from the demolition of a neighboring house into the mortar that coats its steel structure. Claudia Moreira Salles, Aberto’s co-curator, notes that the house and its surrounding complex have been in near-constant transformation since the 1970s. The curatorial approach, she says, aims to mirror “this restlessness and way of living,” bringing together artists “who embody a sense of utopia.”
Salles also situates the project in a broader cultural moment: “Longo conceived Casa Bola at the height of the Counterculture period and was strongly influenced by that movement’s spirit of rupture. He set out to create a dwelling that would question the dominant principles of Modernism and Brutalism — not only in its form, but also in its very concept of living and building.”
Since launching in 2022, Aberto — Portuguese for “open” — has positioned itself as a rare public portal into São Paulo’s residential Modernism, a landscape often hidden behind gates and private ownership. Founder Filipe Assis points to “a growing awareness around the fragility and invisibility of important Modernist houses in São Paulo,” many of which “face uncertain futures” as demolitions make way for new development.
Aberto’s stated aim is to “transform private or under-recognised spaces into platforms for contemporary dialogue,” while also supporting cultural preservation and public awareness around architectural heritage. The initiative began in a private home designed by Oscar Niemeyer, with an exhibition centered on furniture by the Brazilian architect and his daughter, Anna Maria Niemeyer. It has expanded quickly since then — Assis describes its evolution from an experiment into “a consolidated cultural platform.”
Last year, Aberto made its international debut in Paris with an exhibition on Le Corbusier and Brazil at Maison La Roche, the Le Corbusier-designed residence. Attendance, organizers say, has increased tenfold since the first edition, which drew around 3,000 visitors — a sign that the appetite for seeing these spaces, and debating their futures, is only intensifying.
With Casa Bola as both setting and subject, Aberto’s latest edition sharpens that conversation: what happens when a home built as a countercultural prototype becomes a stage for contemporary art — and a reminder of how easily architectural experiments can disappear.
