Transcendent within Forms

Master architect work of Carlo Scarpa blended past and present design ideas

This year marks the 25th anniversary of the passing of celebrated Venetian architect Carlo Scarpa, whose inspired work provided a valuable counterpoint to the prevailing modernism of the 20th century and who has influenced succeeding generations of architects and designers. One of his master works, the Brion Tomb near Treviso, "has become a place of architectural pilgrimage," wrote architecture critic Lilli Hollein recently.
It seems that Scarpa was always battling the prevailing tides. Soon after opening his own office in 1931 while in his mid-20s, he temporarily abandoned architecture after reportedly coming under intense criticism for his contemporary updates of historic building designs. Architecture's loss became the gain of Italian glass design, however. Hooking up with good friend Paolo Venini of the Venini glassworks company on Murano, Scarpa spent 20 years producing innovative art glass designs which re-defined the field. But his passion for building design slowly returned to the forefront of his work and by the late 1940s - when he ended his work with Venini - the architectural community was ready to receive Scarpa's unique interplay of the present with the past.
His first major recognition came with his early 1950s restoration of Palazzo Abatellis, a 15th century building which housed the Galleria Nazionale della Sicilia at Palermo. The Scarpa trademarks were in place: an interplay of opposing elements, attention to spatial arrangement and light, an obsessive attention to beautiful detail and the presentation of architecture as a narrative. He followed up the Palermo work with a revitalization of the interior design of Museo Castelvecchio at Verona. The original building was constructed in the 14th century. Criticized early in his career for restoration work, Scarpa had clearly developed an approach which seamlessly integrated past and present elements to create unique designs indicating the instincts of a master architect. "The measures he takes in the building itself are like the careful retouching of a painting," architecture critic Ruth Hanisch has written. "They can always be distinguished from the original work, but they blend well into the overall picture."
His architectural work was not restricted to restoration, however. Scarpa fashioned a stunning new Olivetti showroom on the Piazza San Marco in Venice in the late 1950s. A stellar reputation for exhibition design grew from Scarpa designs for a Paul Klee exhibit at the 1948 Venice Biennale and a Frank Lloyd Wright show at the 12th Triennale at Milan in 1960. (The American architect, as well as Charles Rennie Mackintosh and traditional Venetian architecture influenced Scarpa's work.) Hanisch says "Scarpa's display elements bring out certain innate expressive aspects of an object. The weight of a piece of sculpture, for example, is visually reinforced by a massive plinth; or the sense of lightness of an exhibit might be accentuated by an arrangement of slenderly dimensioned bars."
One could not look to Scarpa to reinforce prevailing mid-century modernism. Montreal's Canadian Centre for Architecture presented a retrospective of Scarpa's work in 1999. Yale University professor George Ranalli commented at the time: "By the late 1950s, two architects - Louis Kahn in the United States and Carlo Scarpa in Italy - had begun to distance themselves decisively from the functionalist aesthetic and machine technology of the modern movement. They commenced what was essentially an alternative discourse: establishing a dialogue with the history of architecture; returning to the idea of craft, construction method, and on-site invention as the ultimate creative acts in architecture; and moving into a new realm of thinking about interventions in the historic fabric."
A current exhibit in Vienna focuses on Scarpa's archive of 15,000 drawings, which sheds much light on the architect's legendary attention to detail. Lilli Hollein writes that "the drawings underscore in impressive fashion Scarpa's passionate pleasure in draughtsmanship as well as his ongoing design method, which turned even working drawings and details into records of the design process". Although he tried his hand at product design, Scarpa's artisanal approach was not well-suited to the medium. His son Tobia has enjoyed much success as a product designer.
Following Scarpa's sudden death in Japan in the autumn of 1978, the architect was interred at the Brion cemetery at San Vito di Altivole. Originally designed by Scarpa in the late 1960s, the cemetery is indicative of his attention to architectural narrative, which in this instance pointed to a celebration of life and death.
Scarpa biographer Francesco Dal Co says the Venetian architect sought "the primacy of the instant" in his work, but the architect himself seemed to be perpetually out of step with prevailing trends. In his unfashionability, however, Scarpa realized transcendent forms. Perhaps one day an architect will be challenged to restore the exceptional work of this 20th century master.

Publication Date: 2003-09-14
Story Location: http://tandemnews.com/viewstory.php?storyid=3137