Carlo Scarpa: Layers/Stratifications
by Anne-Catrin Schultz
In recent decades, Carlo Scarpa's relevance has been steadily on the rise. At a time when architects have to use existing city and building structures as a point of departure for their work, his oeuvre remains a source of inspiration. Buildings such as the Castelvecchio in Verona show us that architecture is capable of communicating its own history, has meaning, and develops a contemporary dynamic of its own. Scarpa's layered architecture makes visible the process of becoming and the time-related sedimentation of material and meanings. It is especially at points of transition and interface that layering becomes a narrative element that elucidates the tectonic qualities of the building. Overlaying includes leaving a record of how an object came into being -- either by means of the sediments of its history or through the intervention of the architect. In this book Anne-Catrin Schultz presents her research about the phenomenon of layering in Carlo Scarpa's architecture. Layering describes the physical composition of layers defining space as well as the parallel presence of cultural referrals and formal associations imbedded in the physical layers. Scarpa's work is an embodiment of multidimensional layering and, at the same time, a focal point for architectural movements of his time that have stratification as their theme. In most buildings, the principle of layering may be regarded as something that is part of the nature of building. Functional conditions call for planes, elements, or "layers" to provide the supporting structure, and others to protect from rain, cold or the heat of the sun. However, architectonic layering goes beyond merely fulfilling technical requirements -- the principle of layering may be used as a formative method that allows elements of different origins to be combined into a non-hierarchical whole. Layering exists in a realm of complexity and implies a capacity of being interpreted that goes beyond itself and creates references to the world at large. The first part of the book examines Scarpa's fields of influence and intellectual roots and puts them in perspective with former theories and their interpretation of architecture as layered, for example Gottfried Semper's theory of clothing. The second part displays an analysis of three major projects, Castelvecchio and Banca Popolare in Verona and the Querini Foundation in Venice.
https://architectuul.com/architect/carlo-scarpa
Carlo Scarpa (June 2nd, 1906 - November 28th, 1978) was an Italian architect and designer heavily influenced by the history of Venetian culture, materials and landscape. in 1926 obtained his diploma of Professor in Architectural Drawing at the Royal Academy of Fine Art in Venice. He then began his career at the Royal Superior Institute of Architecture of Venice (successively Architectural Institute of Venice University) as assistant to Prof. G. Cirilli. He possessed an exceptional understanding of raw materials, and from 1933 to 1947, was artistic director of Venini - one of the most prominent producers of Venetian glass before he began the pursuit of his career as an architect. During the years 1954-64 he gave annual lessons to Fulbright scholarship holders in Rome. In 1956 he won the National Olivetti Award for Architecture and in 1962 the IN-ARCH National Award for Architecture for the Castelvecchio Museum of Verona. In 1972 he became the Director of the Architectural Institute of Venice University.
Museo Canoviano, Possagno.
Judith Arthur, Stefan Buzas
To commemorate the bicentenary of his birth, the Venetian authorities decided to have an extension added to the overcrowded basilica, and they commissioned the Venetian architect Carlo Scarpa for this delicate task. Scarpa composed a small, but highly articulated building that is in a strong contrast to the Neo-Classical, monumental basilica. The subtly designed sequence of spaces is unique even among Scarpa's so many extraordinary museum interiors as the architect was here in the rare position to compose the spaces as well as the placings of the exhibits. The placing of the sources of natural light which infuses the plaster surfaces with the softness of real life is in itself a rare achievement.
Relation to time
Scarpa's architecture manages to respect the old and historic while simultaneously introducing new and modern design details. In this respect his work is deeply sensitive to the changes of time, all taking shape in a careful selection and combination of materials.
In mounting his 'attack' on the outward signs of architectural habit, Scarpa ending up by designing works meant to elude time, favouring the vivid colours of the past above the dull grey of the future. He achieved the maturity of this approach after a lengthy apprenticeship, working slowly and cautiously. His true youth, for this reason, was irremediably belated.
Scarpa's projects constitute so many experiments. In them, architectural thinking combines with the acquisition of increasingly refined techniques and distills the secrets of form into design. It is this mixture that is responsible for the fragmentary nature of his achievements, which cannot be fully identified with any of his works, with the exception of the monumental Brion-Vega Cemetery for the Brion family in the cemetery of San Vito d'Altivole (from 1969 on). Scarpa's designs are, in fact, mostly provisional arrangements and the involuntary memory that emerges in his drawings points continually back to the past. The incompleteness that is the typical mode of his research reveals his concept of the work in relation to time. It thus becomes possible to see the architectural fragment as the favoured embodiment of Scarpa's work and the coherent expression of his rejection of habit.
Scarpa's design
Right from the start, when Scarpa preferred to "study" with the master glass workers of Murano rather than bow to the restrictions of academic culture, one finds him using drawing and execution as part of the development of experience. The work he achieved up to the start of the '50s reveals the role of visual memory in Scarpa's work. Another comment on Proust could also be revealing here: "For the author who remembers, the main part is not played by what he has seen," affirms Walter Benjamin, "but by the work of remembering, by the Penelope's web of his memory." The results of this tension provide the framework of Scarpa's fragments, which even before being formal events are acts of momentary fixation of experience.
We can imagine the art of seeing which Scarpa came to possess by the end of his apprenticeship, as the result of the intellectual vagabondage that characterized his education. He whiled away the time in gazing, portraying himself through drawing the objectivity of that which he observed. His peculiar formal culture derived from the eye, and by observation he mastered technique. For instance, when he was designing his glass objects in the '30s, he was also observing contemporary figurative works.
This attitude is confirmed by other characteristic features of Scarpa's culture and so by further articulations of his achievement in design. For instance, when he devoted himself to the study of the various techniques of construction - whether in glassware or museum design, in the use of materials or those involved in essential building skills - what seems to have first seized his attention was the creative limitations implicit in them. Hence, in his effort to break through a norm by introducing distortions and even flat contradictions into technical details and constructional solutions, one finds tangible evidence of his rejection of habits and the empty values of utility whose premise they are.
This rejection underlies the special kind of culture of materials Scarpa refined on over the years. His tormented love for the hidden qualities of matter in his buildings developed parallel with attacks on the limitations technical banalization places on use. His desire to question these constraints appears clearly all through his oeuvre, revealing its full coherency in a wide range of achievements. It is articulated in successive phases, in the definition of which the art of seeing develops its own continuous critical commentary on reality. Comment expressed in the language of architectural forms is, indeed, one of the fundamental aims of Scarpa's designs.
Visual comments, going beyond the works exhibited-this is what we find, for instance, in Scarpa's most successful designs of exhibitions. They range from the temporary installations for the exhibitions of Klee (Venice, 1948), Mondrian (Rome, 1956), the room devoted to Antonello da Messina in the exhibition of 15th century Sicilian art (Messina, 1953), down to the museum layouts for the Accademia and the Correr Museum in Venice (1952-56), the Possagno Plastercast Gallery (1956-57), and the Castelvecchio in Verona (1958-64). Scarpa's museums declare even more explicitly than his exhibition mountings the effort he put into shaping materials, light, spatial arrangements and colours as a visual commentary structured around the work of art.
Scarpa's compositions consist of rifts and contrasts - his misgivings over the norm necessarily lead to difference. And difference is the hallmark of a Scarpian fragment. In the detail, deviation takes shape: the viewer's attention focuses on it. The fragment compels a nearer view, it brings the object closer up. This focal reduction appears in the drawings Scarpa scattered over sheets of paper, circling, dismantling and so analyzing the problem he intended to resolve. The horror vacui we find in his papers is the result of a rigid analytical discipline, the only appropriate way to penetrate the subtle form of the fragment.
The Scarpian detail eludes the completeness of any ordering or systematic arrangement. It requires elasticity in composition and excludes general stylistic rules. With regard to the latter question, we need only note Sergio Bettini's observation: Scarpa's "events" speak far more clearly of an absence than of any return to some kind of order. This increases the distance between his works and most of the achievements of modern design.
The withering of standards based on classical rules of composition has given rise to much nostalgia in con-temporary architecture. The uncertainties springing from this seem to be settled when use and function, technology and consumption, reproduction and mass methods, come to be seen as the basic principles for a new system and crystallize into an order of values.
Scarpa displays a substantive indifference towards the 'new" scale of values. The roots of his work pass through the emergent strata of the tradition without being affected by them. He was little involved in the mythologies that determined this tradition. For in-stance, with technology he came to set up what was actually an ironical relationship, when he felt its limits most deeply. Scarpa preferred to play the card of artifice, of the detail, of difference, of the fragment. He saw the norm as an arrest of learning, a manifestation of the laziness of the eye.
Natural elements
Natural elements seen by Scarpa as materials of composition. It should also be noticed that the use of water in Scarpa's gardens is coupled with labyrinthine forms and rare stone materials. The slender watercourse that wends its way through the garden of the Querini- Stampalia Foundation, for instance, spills over a block of white marble chased with a geometrical pattern.. The combination of water and stone seems to revive one of the most important symbolical associations in Buddhist gardens, where these elements are linked in evoking the mystery of life.
Concept of "decoration"
The concept of "decoration" can be associated with a very different order of significance from those commonly ascribed to it by modern formal vocabulary. What has happened is that the tradition's valid principle that nothing is useful unless it is honest ("measured") has been gradually replaced by the conviction thatnothing is honest unless it is useful. This inversion has produced a misunderstanding of the value of ornament. To modern culture and design, decoration and ornament appear as not necessary components of matter revealed, delivered from the indeterminacy of unmeasured quantity. Since "matter" is merely the "material" of a product, the value of ornament is determined by technology, which sees its presence as a system tending to conceal its own intrinsic qualities. The significance of ornament emerges when matter is no longer considered merely as a means, hence a product. The reduction of material to a means is the end result of the "out-reaching hand" of modern technology, in its relation to things and action.
Brion-Vega Cemetery
With the creation of the Brion-Vega Cemetery, Scarpa's struggle against the habits of time completely sheds its makeshift character. The entire project was conceived as an endless work, intended to interpret only the time of maturation of the alchemy, the experiments, the expedients by which the language of its own composition is nurtured. It was no accident that Scarpa desired to be buried here, in this cemetery, near to his own works: only the death of its artificer could have put an end to the building of this autobiographical narrative, treated as a place of enchantments, celebrating in unrepeatable fashion the primacy of the instant, which is the quest of Scarpian composition.
Influence
Scarpa's work was influenced by Frank Lloyd Wright as well as Josef Hoffmann. He executes a "minimalist" aesthetic within historic buildings which allows the existing context to exist within the new work without being disturbed. The extraordinary care in the execution of handrails, floor patterns, benches, door pulls, and the like set Carlo Scarpa's work apart from others of his generation. Scarpa was concerned, with the manipulation of materials in relation to the human body. Scarpa's architecture is expressed through precision detail, a delicate combination of modernism, historicism and craftsmanship.
His work greatly influenced that of other Italian interior designers, most notably Franco Albini. While most of his built work is located in the Veneto region of Italy, he made designs for landscapes, gardens, and buildings in other regions of Italy as well as Canada, the United States, Saudi Arabia, France and Switzerland. One of his last projects, left incomplete at the time of his death, was recently altered (October 2006) by his son Tobia: the Villa Palazzetto in Monselice. This project is one of Scarpa's most ambitious landscape and garden projects.
During his life Scarpa developed a fascination with Japanese art and culture. Although Venice always remained the centre of his activities, starting from the 1950s he undertook several journeys to the Far East. He died in Sendai in the north of Japan on his last journey there in 1978.
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Castelvecchio Museum (Italian: Museo Civico di Castelvecchio) is a museum in Verona, northern Italy, located in the eponymous medieval castle. Restoration by the architect Carlo Scarpa, between 1959 and 1973, has enhanced the appearance of the building and exhibits. Scarpa's unique architectural style is visible in the details for doorways, staircases, furnishings, and even fixtures designed to hold a specific piece of artwork. It is in the Castelvecchio Museum that Carlo Scarpa's delicate handling of ancient buildings comes to its highest achievement. Here floor patterns and materials interact to form a tactile play of pliant versus hard surfaces The new is held apart from the old by revealjoints and spatial slots that function as miniature conceptual "moats," and each work of art is lovingly held up to view by a stand or a bracket that is almost human in its anthropomorphic configuration. Carlo Scarpa resisted the postmodern and neorationalist influences of the 1970s, preferring to elaborate a decorative system derived from the materials of modern architecture used in a craft tradition. Carlo Scarpa was in constant touch with his artisans, and his drawings were revised almost daily to reflect a preindustrial attention to old methods of construction. The museum displays a collection of sculpture, statues, paintings, ancient weapons, ceramics, goldworks, miniatures and some old bells.
The Revoltella Museum is a modern art gallery founded in Trieste in 1872 by Baron Pasquale Revoltella. In 1963 Carlo Scarpa received the order for the restructuring of the Museo Revoltella. The museum consists of three buildings from the second half of the 19th century: the Palazzo Revoltella by architect Hitzig, the Palazzo Brunner and the small Palazzo Basevi. In 1967 the construction work began, difficulties with the construction company began and in 1970 the contract with it was dissolved. The work is discontinued, in 1971 Scarpa resigns the order. It was only in 1980 that the construction was continued under the direction of Franco Vattolo and later Paolo Bartoli and completed in 1991.
In this project, Carlo Scarpa did not modify his design, correct it, as in the case of his other work in a permanent confrontation during the construction work, but his first concept was partly implemented or finalized by other architects. This consists in a rigorous dealings with the old and the new: while the Revoltella was virtually completely preserved and is also managed in the museum as an ambience of the Baron Revoltella and Pinakothek of the 19th century, The Brunner was subjected to comprehensive measures. Into the emptied shell, a skeleton of reinforced concrete was drawn in, which, emphatically accentuated, became an ornament and made the interior (insulated with stone walls) insulated into the exterior. For the vertical orientation, Scarpa uses the Palazzo Revoltella as the theme of the inner courtyard and creates a substantial analogy and at the same time a formal difference with the light-filled entrance situation from the roof. This area and the auditorium on the ground floor are those parts of the museum which were most clearly implemented in the sense of Scarpa's planning.
The Brion Vega Cemetery is in San Vito d'Altivole near Treviso, Italy. Carlo Scarpa began designing the addition to an existing municipal cemetery in 1968. Although he continued to consider changes to the project, it was completed before his accidental death in 1978.
The enclosure is a private burial ground for the Brion family, commissioned by Giuseppe Brion, the founder of the Brionvega company. Scarpa is buried adjacent to the Brion sanctuary. Several discrete elements comprise the Brion family burial site: A sloped concrete enclosing wall, two distinct entrances, a small chapel, two covered burial areas (the arcosolium for Giuseppe and Onorina Brion, and one for other family members), a dense grove of cypresses, a prato (lawn), and a private meditation/viewing pavilion, separated from the main prato by a separate and locked entrance, and a heavily vegetated reflecting pool. The "viewing device" of the pavilion of meditation suggests a vesica piscis, a repeated leitmotif in Scarpa's architecture.
The architect said about this project: "I would like to explain the Tomb Brion. I consider this work, if you permit me, to be rather good and which will get better over time. I have tried to put some poetic imagination into it, though not in order to create poetic architecture but to make a certain kind of architecture that could emanate a sense of formal poetry. The place for the dead is a garden. I wanted to show some ways in which you could approach death in a social and civic way; and further what meaning there was in death, in the ephemerality of life other than these shoe-boxes."
The Banca Popolare di Verona is designed by Carlo Scarpa in collaboration with Arrigo Rudi, who has completed the master's work after his death. The building is located in the historic heart of Verona, and overlooks the Nogara Square.
Banca Popolare di Verona was completed after Scarpa’s death under the supervision of Arrigo Rudi. The Banca's highly articulated facade, a provocative variant on classical models, aroused international controversy.
The head office of the Banca Popolare demonstrated a major development in the was new buildings might intervene in a historic centre. This discourse had been opened up by Scarpa's work for Olivetti and followed by several projects.
Interior design and technical details
A particular quality of the interior of the Banca Popolare lies in the surface finishes that Scarpa employs. Polished and coloured 'stucco lucido' is applied to many surfaces and is particularly associated with elements of vertical circulation - stair and lift enclosures. This is not merely a decorative device since the specular reflections from this conjunction of form and material act to convey light deep into the heart of the building.
The modern office building, almost inevitably, has comprehensive systems of heating, cooling and ventilation. Banca Popolare is no exception, but Scarpa's originality of mind allows him to avoid the conventional solutions to the physical incorporation of the systems into the fabric of the building. A number of vertical risers carry services up the building from the basement plant room and a large horizontal duct runs at roof level connecting these to the rooftop plant room. The relationship of the structural and environmental systems of the building is given expression in the design of the ceilings at all levels. Unlike the vertical layering of the continuous suspended ceiling found in most modern office buildings, Scarpa establishes a clear horizontal differentiation between exposed concrete structure and plastered surfaces beneath service voids. This organizes and disciplines the position of artificial light fittings and air-conditioning grilles.
Facade
The Banca's highly articulated facade, a provocative variant on classical models, aroused international controversy.
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