Even as a child, the Venetian architect Carlo Scarpa was very aware of the fundamental element that would describe and underpin his work many years later: water. When he played and ran around the maze of streets and canals, Scarpa listened to everything around him, especially the richness of stimuli that his hometown offered him. A sensitive reader of places, he found his great text in Venice. This culture, subtle and almost academic, except for that devotion to scenography and the esoteric, is built over time; art, space, history, all compiled in his readings, trips to knowledge, and in his contact with artists and writers.
Scarpa would base his evolution as an architect on his extraordinary visual culture and his respect for tradition and the way of doing things in past eras; taking up the baton of that time and converting his reality into architectural space where all the pieces are independent units, dialoguing with each other or, as he liked to say, singing. He positions himself before what exists, whether it be an artistic piece or architectural space, from knowledge and sensitivity. He will apprehend the history and place in which it occurs and accentuate the existing beauty in things, showing the prominence of the new as a precious element.
But back to water, back to Venice. In the city, craftsmanship has been kept alive, along with the delicacy of its spaces and constructions, and above all, its relationship with the liquid: child of water. Scarpa's passion for this element remained throughout his life and manifested itself in numerous projects. In "A Thousand Cypresses," a lecture given in Madrid in 1978, Scarpa reflected:
I really like water, perhaps because I'm Venetian...
Water, a friend of light and sounds, carrier of its own laws, delights us with its physical presence in some cases, and in others, even in its absence, it also generates forms. Scarpa, through drawing and the slow meditation to progressively distill the form, will outline the water and compose its effects.
In his project for the Patio of the Palazzo Centrale, created for the Viennese representation in the XXVI Biennale [1952], also known as the "sound garden" or "sculpture garden," Scarpa makes use of materials as if it were a symphony: he studies them in detail so that, forming a whole, they can be heard independently. Water links the pieces, as a sound element, mixing in the dialogue of singularities. An almost musical intonation, using water as a spatial wrapper.
Through detail, Scarpa constructs a universe of sensations, a complex and complete space, qualified by water through light and sound, in which nothing is excess or opposed, so that we can only understand it through our journey and movement.
Another pillar in Carlo Scarpa's architectural tradition was Japanese architecture: the taste for the delicate, the contemplative, the recurrence of water. Until 1969, the year he finally made his beloved trip to Japan, he had to make do with his personal library of Japanese tradition. That trip would be crucial in the development of his career and future projects.
If that was his culture to follow, his reference within the architectural events of the time was undoubtedly Frank Lloyd Wright. In "The Language of Organic Architecture" (1978), Lloyd Wright orders a vocabulary of nine words for the approach of the new architecture that he so defended. Both architects longed to find what Wright called the "graphic soul of things," the mystery kept by the difficult language of architecture. Both shared the emotion for Japanese architecture and various cultures such as Maya, Egyptian, and Byzantine; and they pursued the truth of materials as integral parts of space and their expression of time.
In an interview with Martín Domínguez, Scarpa commented:
I have always admired Mies and Aalto, but Wright's work was like a "coup de foudre" for me. I had never had a comparable experience. It swept me away like a wave. You can see it in some of my housing projects
The tangible; what Scarpa was capable of chiseling, giving volume to, enclosing in the form of architectural space or sculpture. But also the intangible; a sensation, a gaze, a sound... Nature itself consults its forms, seeking a beauty that, thanks to the liquid, the atmospheres created by the architect acquire.
This article was originally published on December 20, 2018, and republished on the occasion of the ArchDaily theme: Water in Architecture.
This article is part of the ArchDaily Topics: Water in Architecture, proudly presented by Hansgrohe.
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