Carlo Scarpa’s World: Beauty and Meaning

I have tried to do poetic architecture , but a certain kind of architecture which would emanate a certain sense of poetry for reasons of a formal nature, that is the form expressed could become poetry … Can architecture be poetry?… Of course, architecture is poetry. Frank Lloyd Wright said so in a lecture he gave in London. So the answer is: yes, sometimes architecture is poetry, not always poetry. Society doesn’t always ask for poetry. Poetry isn’t something for every day. You mustn’t think: I’ll produce poetic architecture. You can’t say: I’ll turn out poetic architecture. Poetry is born of the thing in itself, if the person engaged in it has it in him, this nature.¹

If one views the world with love and passion and does things with excitement and joy, then this is poetry made not of words but expressed or created in other ways. [Carlo] Scarpa, according to the accounts of his family and friends, was filled with an uncontainable joy when he strolled around the Piazza San Marco, or when he talked about architecture in interviews or lectures. This poetic sensibility was not something casual or easy; he arrived at it through serious thought, hard work and scrutiny, as his drawings, all of which are poetic expressions as well as records, reveal. Scarpa not only created poetry with his architecture or his glass works, which radiated with life and feeling, but he read a great deal of poetry and collected poetry books. When he died, his library contained 241 such books, mostly of French writers such as Charles Baudelaire, Stéphane Mallarmé, Paul Valéry, Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud, as well as many medieval Italian poets, like Dante and Guido Cavalcanti.²

The base of the Monument to the Partisan Woman, with its irregular pillars set in the Venetian Lagoon, the way he let the blocks gather algae, is a poem written in stone and concrete. That is, Scarpa’s base, combined with its placement within the rising and falling waters and the reclining statue that lies upon it, becomes a poetic articulation on the subject of pain and cannot be analysed in any calculable fashion. Not that Scarpa never used calculations; in fact, he conceived his own units of measurement, his proportional system, which he used to create rhythmic divisions and repetitions. As he explained in a lecture:

I used some tricks. I needed a certain kind of light and I worked out everything on a grid of 5.5 centimetres… In this way, you can divide up the parts and you’ll never have 150 but 154. Many architects use regulatory plans of the golden section. Mine is a very simple grid which allows for movement – the centimetre is arid, while in my way you obtain a relationship.³

This measuring system and the insistent way in which he broke with symmetry and regular order, the way he staggered relationships so that axes break away from their established course, makes Scarpa an anti-Vitruvian, even un-Palladian architect. He insisted that to understand his works one had to remember that he had ‘an immense desire to belong inside tradition, but without having capitals and columns, because you just can’t do them anymore. Not even a god could design an Attic base nowadays. That’s the only decent one… all the rest are junk, even Palladio’s in this respect, are just tripe.’4

For Scarpa, designing was like writing poetry: he had to be sure of every detail of every element used, as one chooses words for a poem. His designs, therefore always took a long time to finish. It is obvious from his drawings that he often changed his mind, conceived new ideas and added details; he could not be forced to work fast. Often, too, he worked on several projects at the same time. This was a way of distancing himself from a work in progress to be able to return to it with fresh eyes. The poetic inspiration shows where each element joins the next, as in a poem where each word draws one into a web of references and meanings that can be interpreted from many perspectives. As he installed artworks in a museum space, or even as he placed staircases, balustrades or other architectural features in a building, Scarpa made sure that the empty spaces in between acted as punctuation, giving cadence, breath and measure to the whole. This symbolism is also how Scarpa thought about architecture as poetry, not only because it is poetically aesthetic but because every element and joint can at the same time be metaphoric. Whether visiting Scarpa’s buildings, looking at his drawings or tracing his biography, one meets a man who is both an artist–someone who lived with poetry and could at times get lost in his love of art and architecture–and someone who could be practical and humorous. Scarpa, who grew up in the old towns of the Veneto, spent his childhood playing among columns and arches, under Baroque walls and details, Byzantine colours and the exuberant variety of the Venetian Gothic. His teaching also reflected his character and his architecture. As Franca Semi, his former student and collaborator, relates, Scarpa frequently used his extensive cultural and literary knowledge when giving his courses, talking often of Valéry, for instance, or of music.⁵ Certainly one can conclude that Scarpa’s architectural depth and finesse were the fruits of his rich cultural awareness. 

Base for the Monument to the Partisan Woman

Venice, Italy, 1968
Emiliano Bugatti

After the destruction of Leoncillo Leonardi’s ceramic La Partigiana, leaving behind only part of Scarpa’s concrete pedestal, the city of Venice opened a competition for a new memorial sculpture to be situated on a base commissioned from Scarpa. The competition winner was Augusto Murer (1922-1985) with his bronze sculpture of a female resistance fighter lying on the ground, her wrists tied and her face displaying her suffering. Scarpa decided to place the sculpture on a platform in the waters of the canal, near the entrance to the Giardini, surrounded by cubic pillars of concrete, faced with stone, in varying heights. The installation was intended to appear or become submerged with the tides. The irregularly placed blocks, together creating an almost chaotic arrangement to evoke pain and confusion, remind one of Peter Eisenman’s later Holocaust Memorial in Berlin (2005) with its concrete stelae in different heights.

‘Carlo Scarpa: The Complete Buildings’ is published by Prestel, with photography by Cemal Emden, edited by Emiliano Bugatti and texts by Jale N. Erzen. Available online and at all good bookstores .

References

^1.Philippe Duboy, ‘Scarpa/Matisse: Crosswords’, in Carlo Scarpa: The Complete Works, ed. Dal Co Mazzariol, p. 170.
^2.Rafaella Vendramin, ‘Carlo Scarpa’s Library’, in Carlo Scarpa: The Complete Works, ed. Dal Co and Mazzariol, p. 307. Dante was exiled from Florence and settled in Ravenna and was buried in Rimini.
^3.Scarpa, ‘A Thousand Cypresses’, p. 286.
^4.Ibid., p. 287.
^5.Franca Semi, A lezione con Carlo Scarpa (Milan, 2021), pp.31, 169, 197, 231.