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Time on His Side

Carlo Scarpa's work is as alive to the future as it is to the past.

By Joseph Giovannini

		"Carlo Scarpa, Architect: Intervening with History" Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal Through October 31
		A study for Scarpa's renovation of the fourteenth-century Museo di Castelvecchio, Verona (1956--64) (photo: Umberto Tomba, courtesy: Canadian Centre for Architecture)
		The chapel at the Brion family tomb near Treviso (1969--78): The exterior with pond. (photo: Guido Guidi, courtesy: Canadian Centre for Architecture)
		The chapel at the Brion family tomb near Treviso (1969--78): The interior with brass altar. (photo: Guido Guidi, courtesy: Canadian Centre for Architecture)
		Section-elevation of the water pavilion at the Brion family tomb with perspective and detail studies (1970--74). (drawing courtesy Collection Archivio Carlo Scarpa, photographed by François Bastien for the Canadian Centre for Architecture)

Suspended in time and saturated with history, the sublime cluster of islands in the Venetian lagoon where Carlo Scarpa was born and educated resisted industrialization through the twentieth century. From the 1920s until his death in 1978, Scarpa had craftsmen as everyday colleagues, and many of the 150 drawings in the show "Carlo Scarpa, Architect: Intervening with History," at the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) in Montreal, represent the kind of visual chat he engaged in while conferring with them about how best to design a fitting.

But Scarpa's craft-oriented practice in a city outside time has too often been ghettoized, as though his architecture were possible only in the antiquated ecosystem of the Veneto. In staging the first major retrospective of his work in North America, the CCA has sought to correct an essentially dismissive reading of Scarpa as a less than relevant regionalist by emphasizing both his acceptance of the past and the brilliance he displayed while working with it. Instead of confronting history antagonistically, he developed an additive design method that overlaid existing architectural strata with an abstract design language.

Correct though the curators are to remove Scarpa from one ghetto, they risk putting him in an adjacent one--as an inspired specialist in the adaptive reuse of existing buildings. But Scarpa was much more than a Modernist unafraid of the past: It could be argued that the unique conditions of practicing in Venice made him one of the first postindustrial architects to shift paradigms from simplicity to the complexity that has characterized design in the late twentieth century. He was a poet of the fragment long before Frank Gehry tore apart his house in Santa Monica in 1979 or Zaha Hadid imploded her sporting club on the Peak in Hong Kong in 1983.

Certainly Scarpa's interventions in historic buildings were innovative, and they are especially relevant today, when shortsighted design review boards across America insist that all changes to historic buildings be mimetic. But his approach to the past also reveals an open system of design that embraces the city beyond the building, subjectivity beyond objectivity, and irrationality beyond linearity. In a century driven toward simplicity by the ethic of industrial production and mass consumption, where the subject matter of buildings has often been limited to function, Scarpa managed to expand the expressive potential of architecture. He is a seminal figure for architects at the cusp of the millennium precisely because craft and history allowed him to bypass the conveyor-belt mentality that ignored so many other issues in design.

If, for Mies, Gropius, Corbusier, et al, the industrialization of architecture meant systematization--standardizing parts into what Corb called solutions types for assembly-line production and universal use--Scarpa could avoid this reductive assumption in his pocket of Italian culture. In the ancient European tradition of changing a standing structure, he was adding to a given building, though the parts he fitted to existing contexts were composed and abstracted according to a Modernist aesthetic. Scarpa, who seldom had the luxury of building from the ground up in Italy's already occupied landscape and cityscape, did not start projects with the anticipation of creating Euclidean wholes or Cartesian grids. It is not that he was unsystematic or erratic in his design process. He was simply not thinking in terms of building systems and prototypes that could be mass-manufactured; he was not regularizing the parts of a building as if they were cogs in a larger, conceptual machine. He was designing outside the entire edifice of the International Style.

Scarpa designed locally rather than universally; he accepted the unique, the peculiar, and the accidental rather than demanding the general, the normative, and the ideal. In a museum installation, the way that a thin steel bracket both supported and revealed the qualities of a statuary fragment concerned him. He dwelled on how natural light could best strike a portrait, and how the long braid of a statue should be seen before its face. The experience of an environment mattered more than issues of production. His architecture was accountable to the eye and body rather than to the machine. Efficiency was not the concern. In the Veneto, time was on Scarpa's side, and by using surfaces that drank in time, he treated it, like light, as a material that could be conjured and shaped. There was a modesty to the scale of his projects, even when the projects were large; he created chamber works.

In the six CCA galleries, the general informality of the drawings, which often combine plan, section, elevation, and multiple views at different scales, anticipates the apparent informality of Scarpa's design. The temperament of his drawings also anticipates the temperament of his projects--understated, considered, detailed, undogmatic, charming. Perspective drawings by hard-line Modernists were often machine-like, zooming off to a controlling vanishing point, their implacably regular visual logic mowing down everything not fitting the cone of vision. Scarpa instead burnished exceptions and idiosyncrasies and made them building blocks of his vision.

He understood that visitors to buildings do not occupy a visual machine that totalizes seeing; rather, they experience buildings as disparate parts. The sum total of the exceptional moments Scarpa so carefully composed was the unsystematic system of his design. Like Wright, whose work he deeply admired, Scarpa broke the box.

Curated by Mildred Friedman and installed by New York architect George Ranalli under the direction of chief CCA curator Nicholas Olsberg, the show exhibits eight projects in an environment whose palpable gentleness emanates from Scarpa's softly colored, softly lined pencil drawings. The curators have not overproduced the show, letting the quietly stated work create its own mist. Only the four wood models by the Ranalli studio summarize the ideas in the projects, while banks of sensitive photographs by Guido Guidi subtly capture the buildings in time and changing light. Guidi's lens interprets the buildings as sundials marking events in the day and season. Unlike most Modernists, Scarpa chose materials that would season with age.

It is hard to find an iconic structure among the eight projects in the show be-cause Scarpa did not design object-buildings but dealt instead with open, frequently porous forms with indeterminate edges that add up to fields of fragments. His meticulously sequenced chains of events--collages of colored-plaster walls, thin brass display armatures, bracketed views--make relational environments of shifting parts that release rather than fix visitors in space: His spaces don't drive you down their centers but encourage perambulation along richly developed edges that are microenvironments in themselves. Light itself is a visitor to these edges, insinuating its way behind planes, striking surfaces, feathering into shadow.

Most of the drawings are of existing buildings that Scarpa transformed with his collagist additions and subtractions, but we can perhaps see Scarpa's approach to architecture most clearly in what he built outside of the context of other people's work. The famous Brion family tomb, in a cemetery near Treviso, was critical in Scarpa's oeuvre because it allowed him to choreograph his field of parts within an actual field. A chapel, a water pavilion, some individual tombs, and some entries make up the project programmatically, but he disperses the program in an open terrain bounded and quieted by high, leaning concrete walls.

The family tomb typifies the complexity usually found in Scarpa's composite abstractions, embracing both the intimate and the monumental, the ineffable and the solid. Scarpa developed an elaborate iconological program that featured circles, sometimes twinned to represent birth, marriage, regeneration, eternity. The poured concrete walls and forms give the ensemble a sense of permanence, and the spaces, expanding and contracting, are highly differentiated and never repetitive. As with Mies, God is in the detail, but Scarpa's detail is not universal. An edge of a building is raised in relief so that it catches light and becomes a momentary drawing in space. The chapel is designed so that a corner forms a perfect triangle at noon on a day just after the summer solstice. Sitting in a reflecting pool, a pavilion appears to float, light bouncing off the water's surface onto the ceiling.

The soul of this family tomb originates in the sheer personal effort Scarpa invested in the conceptual drawings he made of it, where he invented its special moments in long periods of graphic rumination. The collection of so many unique moments creates a space of wonder--an atmospheric grouping of buildings poetically appropriate for a precinct of death because the design, particularly in its use of water and light, has so much life.

The epiphany of the CCA exhibition is a model of the Veritti house in Udine, done in 1955--56, which shows how Scarpa applied the vision he gained through earlier encounters with the past to new freestanding structures. When Scarpa dealt with existing buildings, he purposely distinguished the new from the old. But even within the new pieces, he pushed the differentiation, which is one of the fundamental design principles so clearly exhibited in Ranalli's beautifully crafted model. As always, there is no sense of a unitary whole, no single geometric idea or volumetric form under which all the parts fall into place. The plan is an interwoven composite of circular, orthogonal, and triangulated geometries that is not simply extruded to the second and third floors, but is differentiated as it rises--like a village that has grown vertically over centuries of additions. As in his museum adaptations, the house seems an accretion of parts. The underlying order of the three-dimensional collage does not dictate form but relaxes it, allowing the building to better respond to exterior and interior requirements and opportunities: Scarpa pulls out window bays, large and small, when he needs to. A semicircular facade, combined with the triangular edge of a rectangular form set within a semicircular pond, sets the house in rotation. A promenade of discovery occurs around the house, not simply inside it.

There are strong echoes of late Frank Lloyd Wright in the plan (and decorative pilasters), but even Wright's freewheeling hexagonal houses, which angle in several directions, build on single rather than multiple geometries. Again, Scarpa designed by creating unique parts and individual moments, and the tension in his design lies in the contradistinction he drew between them. The mind cannot anticipate what the next corner will bring in the unpredictable layout of the Veritti house. The three-story building with the ungraspable exterior continuously metamorphoses at its perimeter.

Outside Italy, there was hardly any context in which Scarpa's work could find resonance, and after his death in 1978 he remained a fascinating anomaly. Finally, two decades later, the world has caught up with him in a generation of architects now reaching professional maturity, and at last his celebrations of the fragment resonate in a larger context. Like many architects today, he was interested in difference rather than similarity, and his concern with permanence led him to emphasize a tactile substantiality. Contrary to the work of International Style architects, he did not subtract weight from mass to get volume. Scarpa's design--particularly the assumptions about construction behind it--confers weight and gravitas on his abstractions: They get physical.

Curiously, today's digital office, in which one computer can talk directly to its colleagues in a faraway plant or shop, makes differentiation in manufacturing economically feasible. The computer bridges the postindustrial and craft economies, and as a result the machine no longer has to stamp out identical, interchangeable parts. The tradition of constituent parts uniquely "crafted" for buildings has been restored. Though Gehry in the 1970s predicated his rough-tech aesthetic on the death of craft, his computer now lets him speak directly to the machines in the factory and quarry, giving him effectively the same access to craftsmanship that we see in Scarpa's drawings. The stone-facing in Gehry's first design for Disney Hall, for example, was designed with hundreds of differently sized and contoured squares.

Perhaps because Scarpa practiced in out-of-the-mainstream Venice and worked with the spiritual descendants of medieval craftsmen, he seems a remote figure. But he died only 20 years ago, and his work, while it dealt with historic tissue, was prophetic and remains contemporary. Venetian craftsmanship did Scarpa the considerable service of releasing him from the linear thinking that characterized much Modernist design. He is not so much a figure of the past as a conceptual mentor to and contemporary of many architects practicing today. His unexpected, poetically evocative designs, so full of aura and tactility, speak to current aspirations. It is a propitious moment to bring out this show, and well worth the excursion to the farsighted CCA up in Montreal.

Joseph Giovannini is a New York--based architectural critic and practitioner.


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