From the September 2024 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.
There’s something more than a little strange about the architecture of Carlo Scarpa. He was a modernist who seemed at his most creative when working with historic buildings (rather than just demolishing them, as so many of his contemporaries might have) and he indulged a love of craft and detail that can seem anachronistic. He also worked in Venice, which is, you might think, the very worst place for a modernist to build a career, a city as complete, wistful and as close to a museum as a city can be.
Scarpa’s work absorbed so many strands and became so rich it could be almost sickly; Frank Lloyd Wright and Louis Kahn, art deco and brutalism, Japanese, mid century Milanese, Secession, Swedish modern, industrial, Byzantine, sci-fi; the more you look, the more you might be able to isolate little moments of influence; present but rarely dominant.
Today he is more studied, admired and fetishised than he ever has been before, though he remains entirely outside the mainstream. The St Regis hotel in Venice now offers a Carlo Scarpa tour, or you could buy Luciano Pollifrone’s guide to his works in Venice or the hefty new Prestel book with Cemal Emden’s luscious architectural photographs. But why exactly is it that Scarpa has remained such a cult figure almost half a century after he died?
An interior from the Brion Tomb complex, near Treviso, Italy (1969–78), designed by Carlo Scarpa (1906–78). Photo: © Cemal Emden, published in Carlo Scarpa: The Complete Buildings by Jale N. Erzen and Emiliano Bugatti (Prestel Publishing)
Scarpa was born in Venice in 1906, though he spent much of his childhood on the mainland in nearby Vicenza. He studied architecture but, for some reason I have never seen properly explained, he refused to sit the professional exams and was never accredited. (Wright, Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe all lacked professional qualifications, too.) Fittingly, he started his career in glass manufacture. Brought in by the glassmaker Venini as creative director in 1932 to inject a little modernity into the fusty Murano industry, he created hundreds of designs that established art glass as a colourful counterpart to contemporary art. He then worked on exhibition designs and small residences in and around Venice, honing his intense, complex manner on the city’s smaller, more complicated interiors. Wrapped in rich veneers, punctuated by hardware and details in brass and timber crafted like art jewellery and decorated with space-saving furniture, his designs recall Viennese shops (he was a huge admirer of the Vienna Secession architect Josef Hoffmann) or the cabins of luxury liners.
It was Scarpa’s museum commissions, though, that brought him wider acclaim. There is no single best building – rather, a slow accumulation of detail, light, space, juxtaposition and a daring approach to display: the more of Scarpa’s work you see, the more effective it becomes. His work at the Accademia in Venice (1945– 59) indicates where he was headed. Seemingly small interventions – paintings mounted on free-standing easels or in glass and steel cases – show that modern details do not necessarily jar with gothic detail or gilded ceilings. The more stripped interiors he inserted into the Museo Correr (1957–60) go further. (Franco Albini was using similar methods, just as Lina Bo Bardi would later, though their efforts perhaps look a little self-conscious today.)
One of Scarpa’s most memorable early works is the Olivetti showroom (1957–58) – once completely accessible as a shop and now an odd kind of museum – with its floating stairs, golden highlights and spatial complexity: radical modernism impeccably inserted into the Renaissance fabric.
An interior from the Olivetti showroom in Venice, Italy (1957–58), designed by Carlo Scarpa (1906–78). Photo: © Cemal Emden, published in Carlo Scarpa: The Complete Buildings by Jale N. Erzen and Emiliano Bugatti (Prestel Publishing)
After that came bigger commissions: public buildings, banks and more museums, the best of which is the Museo di Castelvecchio in Verona (1957–75). This combination of castle and palazzo, gallery and gardens became the locus of a Gesamtkunstwerk in which Scarpa united the disparate parts using an architectural language that could be industrial at one moment and delicate the next. Setting medieval statuary against De Stijl-like plaster panels or on plinths of concrete and steel, he introduced layers of modernity into a 14thcentury structure. Gangways span overhead and heavily engineered roof structures usher in a kind of brutal High Tech, while every door, window and opening was designed to be distinct and different, to help the visitor navigate the cavernous spaces. At the Querini Stampalia in Venice (1959–63) he reproduced that intensity on a smaller scale, creating one of Venice’s most condensed architectural experiences, from the fine little bridge to the water features that became his signature. There is always a hint of Atlantis in Scarpa.
His work might also be familiar to those who have wandered the grounds of the Venice Biennale: take the delightful former ticket booth with its leaf-shaped roof and curving glass, or the sculpture garden with its chunky columns and cheese-hole roof, or even the superb Venezuelan pavilion.
Steps in the Brion Tomb complex, near Treviso, Italy (1969–78), designed by Carlo Scarpa (1906–78). Photo: © Cemal Emden, published in Carlo Scarpa: The Complete Buildings by Jale N. Erzen and Emiliano Bugatti (Prestel Publishing)
Scarpa died suddenly in 1978 after falling down a set of stairs in Sendai, Japan. There is a tragic irony here. If one thing is unique about Scarpa’s work it is the stripping back of layers to create stepped forms; on the ground, in pools of water, in the walls, so that each appears to reveal more depth, surfaces beneath surfaces. Nowhere is this more apparent than in his final major work, the Brion Tomb near Treviso.
Here Scarpa created a landscape of memory, a capriccio of concrete in which the ground is seemingly excavated to reveal pools and streams. From the mosaic-rimmed interlocking rings that frame its most memorable moment to the concrete canopies that provide shade and shadow, right down to flashes of gold and shafts of sunlight, this is a complex ostensibly about death, but actually about discovery. There is very little like it, though Paolo Soleri’s unsettling desert utopia at Arcosanti in Arizona cleaves closely to its architectural inventions.
Scarpa is too much to be always in fashion; too intense and individual to be copied; perhaps too particular to work outside Venice and its environs. But his work is truly engaged with history, material and form and, once seen, utterly unforgettable. He seems destined to remain a cult.
Carlo Scarpa: The Complete Buildings by Emiliano Bugatti and Jale N. Erzen, with photographs by Cemal Emden, is published by Prestel.
From the September 2024 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.