*Swimming at the Querini Stampalia Foundation
Late in his professional life, Le Corbusier devoted considerable energy to the ill-fated, though influential, design of a civic hospital in Venice. In 1964, during one of his visits to this archipelago, he set aside his responsibilities and spent a tranquil midday, like a tourist, visiting the sights of Venice. His walk brought him to the Querini Stampalia Foundation, which had recently been renovated. While gazing around with admiration, he said aloud: "Who is the good artisan here?" The hosts replied, "Carlo Scarpa." We can imagine that Le Corbusier posed his question with mixed motives. Scarpa had aroused the master's curiosity, but Le Corbusier may have supposed Scarpa to be less an architect and more a tradesman, or perhaps an interior decorator. Le Corbusier's assumption, of course, is a commonplace one. What is astonishing about most of Scarpa's works is the enormous attention he lavishes on the smallest details: the deep undertone of a plaster frame's finish, the gleaming brass cladding of a steel hinge, an enameled tile set into a rough concrete wall. Such phrasing stirs us, even startles us. Does the ensemble cohere into something greater than its flawless and striking parts, or does it emerge as a treasury of gems, precision and delicacy, and testimony to refined taste, though ultimately more craft than art? During his lifetime, he was little known in Europe. In America, he was virtually unknown. Scarpa's output was modest, and Italy's depressed postwar economy and politicized architectural community assigned little value to it. This atmosphere persisted until the 1970s, when an emerging generation of American architects became drawn to Scarpa, including Steven Holl, Billie Tsien, George Ranalli, Michael Rotundi, Eric Owen Moss, and another group of young architects. Scarpa's allure lay in the diverse values concealed in his work. His attention to detail was at odds with the dreary expediency of late Modernism and the hollow extravagances of Postmodernism. His deft interventions in historical buildings challenged the self-righteous bullying of late Modernism and the pedestrian servility of Postmodernism. His emphasis on the phenomenological stood in opposition to the linguistic orientation of the prevailing architectural theory. Finally, his marginal professional position seemed to offer an authentic alternative to the tangled mess of existing architectural firms. At least in America, Scarpa had arrived. My acquaintance with Carlo Scarpa's work had two sides. I was attending architecture school at a time when Scarpa's reputation was on the rise; I did not discover his work on my own initiative, but rather under the pressure of professors (which, of course, is never a good beginning, however well-intentioned). I was a novice, and was searching somewhat out of desperation, looking for what I imagined was a more fundamental approach to architecture. About Scarpa's works one can say many things, except that they are easy to understand. If one has access only to the scattered photographs and drawings of his architecture, one will not be able to decode their
broader meanings. It was as though I wanted to learn English and the professor had placed Finnegans Wake before me. Before setting it aside, I asked, "What on earth is this?" Not long after, while lost in the labyrinth of Venice, I arrived by chance at the Querini Stampalia Foundation and fell under Scarpa's spell. Wandering in the Foundation's small gallery, I was beside myself: I did not know how or where I was, but I knew that I had entered somewhere different. Later I understood how Scarpa casts his spell: how he transmutes the solid into the liquid and how, in the course of this work, he sometimes evokes a total spatial effect that lifts us from the ground and releases us into a liquid medium to float. Scarpa's sensibility, especially for an architect, was fundamentally strange. An aquatic performance. Crossing through this chapter, I return once more to Venice and the Querini Stampalia Foundation, for it is there that Scarpa's aquatic sensibility reaches its zenith. But first, a brief excursion through a key passage by the philosopher Martin Heidegger. Scarpa was an architect of profound sensation, a provider of phenomena, and Heidegger, perhaps more than any twentieth-century philosopher, strove toward a phenomenological reading of the world. In this excursion, I do not intend to offer a comprehensive interpretation of Heidegger's works, but rather to furnish a rhetorical instrument that reveals the exceptional world of Venice. It seems to me that Venice offers a key to understanding the fundamental rupture between Scarpa's sensibility and that of his contemporaries.
A central concept in Heidegger's work concerns dwelling. Dwelling, in Heidegger's vocabulary, is not simply living on the earth and attending mindlessly to the affairs of life. Dwelling goes beyond habit and gently descends into the poetics of being, a kind of profound appreciation for participating in the fundamental qualities of the concrete. For Heidegger, architecture becomes a powerful metaphor for how we arrange truth so that it functions and reveals the essential qualities of the world. Heidegger writes: "Because building, merely as a means and a way for dwelling, is not dwelling — building is in itself already dwelling." Heidegger, in his essay "The Origin of the Work of Art," offers an example of dwelling — now well known — the Greek temple:
The building stands there, resting on rocky ground. This resting of the work draws up out of the rock the mystery of its clumsy yet spontaneous support. The building stands there and withstands the storm that rages above it, and in so doing first makes the storm manifest its violence. The luster
and gleam of the stone, though itself apparently only by the grace of the sun, yet first brings to light the light of day, the breadth of the sky, and the darkness of the night. The temple's firm towering makes visible the invisible space of air. The steadfastness of the work contrasts with the surge of the surf, and its own calm draws out the raging of the sea. Tree and grass, eagle and bull, snake and cricket first enter into their distinctive shapes and thus come to appear as what they are. The Greeks early called this emerging and rising in itself and in all things phusis and named it. It clears and illuminates that upon which and in which man bases his dwelling. We call this ground the earth.
This is a beautiful passage. Undoubtedly, through his political entanglements, through the fabrication of origins for the slippery vicissitudes of language, through his penchant for adorning things with ontological significance, damage has been done; he does not let things be, he fills them with being (emphasized being). Nevertheless, I am pointing to a very simple matter: Heidegger pictures the earth as a stable condition, a ground from which the work inevitably extends. The work, too, is seemingly compelled to soar toward the sky. Hence, the temple "draws up out of the rock the mystery of its clumsy yet spontaneous support." Moreover, it concerns an inviolable pair of opposites that necessarily converse, with the sky acting as the unbalanced companion to the steadfast presence of the earth. And although Heidegger continues his description with the caveat that the earth is "not to be associated with the idea of a mass of matter deposited somewhere, or with the merely astronomical idea of a planet," the momentum of his rhetoric about earth and sky, and his imagery — "tree and grass, eagle and bull, snake and cricket" — drives the pair of opposites forward. He concludes this paragraph with the pronouncement: "Earth is that whence the arising brings back and shelters everything that arises without violation. In the things that arise, earth is present as the sheltering agent." It is difficult to imagine otherwise. The way we live on the earth, even in our most bewildered moments — our feet on the ground, our heads toward the sky — confirms this understanding.
The Querini Stampalia Foundation, from Santa Maria Formosa Square
Indeed, Kenneth Frampton, in his seminal and encyclopedic study of modern architecture, Studies in Tectonic Culture, grounds a substantial portion of his argument on the phenomenology of architecture and on the "inevitability of the earthbound nature of the building," which seems self-evident. Even two accepted works of twentieth-century architecture that leap freely from the ground — Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater and Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye — are largely dependent on the fact that they leap from something to something else. Fallingwater springs from a hillside in Pennsylvania, and Villa Savoye hoists itself above the plain of Poissy; both leave the earth toward the sky, but the very movement reaffirms earth and sky as opposites, as poles of a dialectic. It is difficult to imagine any other reading. Venice, of course, must not be overlooked. First, from across the lagoon, from a boat, we glance at Venice. The buildings appear to be suspended in a field of sea and sky, each reflecting the other and finally dissolving into undertones of blue-gray. Now, where is the ground? A thin line, barely perceptible, upon which it is impossible for the buildings to be supported. The buildings are strangely afloat; they cannot be anchored on solid ground — there is no ground. But as we walk in the campo, the paving stones seem firm, the buildings appear sufficiently stable, and we suppress our uneasy intuition, accustomed as always to the collective reassurance of terra firma. Yet history reveals that this is nothing other than a denial of reality. Venice was organized in the fifth century. With the fall of Rome, hordes of Vandals poured over the northern borders of Italy and, from Aquileia to Padua, dispersed among the population; this migrant group eventually settled among the traders and fishermen of the Realtine islands. "Islands" in this case is a euphemism; the Realtine islands were little more than mudflats. Gradually, the citizens developed techniques to stabilize this primeval swamp, packing and confining it behind retaining walls of stone, stealing from the lagoon until Venice grew to four times the size of the original lowlands. The squares themselves functioned as innovative systems for drinking water: rainwater infiltrated through the unmortared paving stones, flowed into drainage boxes that punctuated the campo, was purified through the sand beneath, and collected in wells that sat atop the impermeable clay that lined the entire system. The squares are not merely Venice's public crossroads; they also serve as cisterns — floating cisterns. Builders also developed ingenious strategies for sustaining the myth of ground in the course of constructing grand and lavish buildings. They drove hundreds of wooden piles into the unstable soil layers and secured them in the caranto, the harder lower layer of clay and sand. Atop these stacked platforms, the builders fashioned grand buildings with brick veneer, wooden flooring and ceiling joists and tile roofs in the fashion of the day, and clad the most magnificent of these compositions in marble filigree. Of course, the farther Venice advanced into the lagoon, the less access the piles had to the caranto. In the sixteenth century, they abandoned piles altogether and replaced them with a stronger system combining brick, mortar, stone, and timber — a kind of composite boat upon which the buildings floated. In Venice, buildings do not spring from the ground — they bind themselves to the mud beneath or hover above it. In Venice, buildings do not spring from the ground because in Venice there is no ground. The precariousness of this condition is evident everywhere. Moisture from the waterways creeps up the walls, causing the building veneers to peel like dried skin and exposing the underlying brick structure — bricks that
crumble from this very persistent moisture. Buildings are reflected in the water, an endless doubling in which, on a calm day, it is difficult to tell which is real: the shimmering reflection of the building or the crumbling building itself. There is a clumsy irony to this relationship between building and site; this doubling inspires a kind of Venetian slapstick in which the canal water scolds the very heavy buildings and flings their reflections back like a cream pie to the face. If we continue to suppress these troubling observations, the acqua alta surges in like an unwelcome dream, insisting upon the dominion of water, threatening to sweep the entire fabric into the lagoon and erase that beautiful, thin, slender line forever. The media most often depict Venice's high tides as though they were a Disneyesque spectacle meant to amuse tourists. But the effect of the tides on Venice has been catastrophic, especially during the successive floods of the late 1950s and early 1960s, which peaked in the devastating destruction of November 1966. Scarpa himself described how "floating debris, pieces of timber, seaweed, algae, clods, organic filth, putrid foam, and ugly clay pots swirl in the vortexes of Venice, along with half a calf's head at their center, brutally cut by the butcher; along those map lines of biliary anatomy that separate the better cuts of meat from heart and intestines." This urban landscape is also a natural landscape, both tending toward entropy or, if we wish to employ a Latin term that Scarpa as a devout Catholic might have used to the extreme: in articulo mortis, at the moment of revelation.
Carlo Scarpa was born on the second of June 1906 in Venice. Two years later, his family moved to Vicenza, but when Scarpa was thirteen and had been accepted at the Academy of Fine Arts, they returned to Venice. In 1962, to escape the floods and while work at the Querini Stampalia Foundation was ongoing, he left Venice for the slopes of Asolo. At this time he was in his mid-fifties, a mature architect with remarkable talents. Among these talents, Scarpa's foremost skill was in working with materials, a capability evident in his designs for Cappellin, and later for Venini, and in the glassworks of the Venetian island of Murano. Murano had been a center of glassmaking since the tenth century, and glass has become so commonplace that we have forgotten its paradoxical genesis. Glass, despite its transparent capacities, is fundamentally made from sand, and despite its cohesive appearance, has no fixed melting point and, as an open, non-crystalline microstructure, is a liquid that has been supercooled. For two decades (1927-1947), Scarpa collaborated with the legendary glass masters of Murano, developing innovative techniques: sommerso layered glass with crystalline depths, corroso added a luminous texture, battuto set glass upon a shattered surface, and tessuto wove various ribbons into glass. It appears that Scarpa returned this particular Venetian compound of sand and liquid to a fluid state: colorful patterned things are reflected and tremble in the depths of massive forms caught in between. Scarpa first came to know glass, and its lessons stayed with him. Scarpa also had a remarkable sympathy for historical artifacts, which led to extensive museum renovations at the Palazzo Abatellis in Palermo, the Venice Academy, the Canova Plaster Cast Gallery in Possagno, and the Castelvecchio in Verona, as well as numerous contemporary art installations, and most notably successive Venice Biennales. Scarpa's intense inclination toward this subject was hardly ordinary and cannot be attributed solely
to his having grown up in a city that is itself an enormous museum. Scarpa most often guided paintings in ornate easels with brass hinges, books in vitrines with delicate legs, sculptures on quasi-boat pedestals or on extended metallic skeletons, and displayed them — so that they would traverse the different hygienic world of museums without fully entering our world. We wonder about the possible connections, and not merely as an intellectual exercise. They are fully anchored to the ground, yet they unsettle themselves with nested hesitations or hide behind the shadow of screens. It is as if the artistic artifacts have also stepped into the campo, though with profound mistrust. We can only surmise that Scarpa shared in this mistrust — that, as an architect, he questioned the assumption most of us hold: how can I be joined to the ground if it is not there? We must also not forget Scarpa's admiration for the works of Frank Lloyd Wright, an influence for which, after many false attempts, he found a way in the beautiful Olivetti showroom in Piazza San Marco. Once again, a detail catches the eye. The Istrian limestone stair treads that cascade from the second-floor showroom to the first floor like a waterfall are reminiscent of the concrete cantilevers of Wright's Fallingwater, but Wright abstracts the landscape waterfall into brittle geometries, whereas Scarpa shapes the stone in the twists and turns of successive waves. Undoubtedly, Wright and Scarpa cross paths, though they proceed in different directions: Wright from liquid to solid, Scarpa from solid to liquid. It is testimony to the unusual nature of Scarpa's professional life that in 1956 he received the Olivetti commission and simultaneously the National Design Prize, and in that same year, the Venetian architects' association filed a complaint against him for the illegality of his practicing as an architect. Although Scarpa taught at the Venice Faculty of Architecture throughout his life, he never received a university degree in architecture. Of course, any biography of Scarpa is condemned to be a cursory glance. Scarpa had a library of four thousand volumes and described himself as "a Byzantine man who arrived in Venice via Greece." Such an embryonic journey could encompass all the monuments of Western (and consequently, Eastern) civilization... made possible only by water. Scarpa was born on water, came of age on water, and built on water, not on ground. Despite his earth-bound contemporaries, Scarpa possessed an aquatic temperament, saturated with Venice.
The history of the Querini Stampalia Foundation is strangely Venetian. The Querini Stampalia family palazzo, built between 1513 and 1523, was of the common Venetian type: a four-story house whose warehouse opened directly onto the canal, a piano nobile for business dealings, and the upper floors providing the private family quarters. Behind this grand palazzo was a garden protected by high walls. The family's fortunes shone conspicuously bright, since in 1869, a relative, Silvestro Faliero, who had married Elisabetta Querini, became the President of Venice. In 1869, Count Giovanni Querini Stampalia died and bequeathed the palazzo and its collection to "the advancement of research in useful disciplines and national and foreign learning." When the Foundation's director, Giuseppe Mazzariol, engaged Scarpa in 1958, the plan was to renovate the ground floor, which the successive incursion of Venice's high tides had severely damaged. This section was to be devoted to gallery space, but it also had to account for future floods.
1-Entry bridge 2-Vestibule 3-Portico 4-Northeast room 5-Main exhibition room
6-Library staircase 7-Travertine door 8-Southwest room 9-Garden terrace 10-Lawn
11-Water source 12-Pool 13-Dry well 14-Greenhouse courtyard Plan diagrams: 4-square, program 9-square plan, and double-square plan
It is not necessary to detail the successive stages of the renovation, except to note that Scarpa's exacting method of work demanded the patience and commitment of a patron. Mazzariol was apparently ideal in both respects, his patience matched only by what must be considered a profound and critical admiration for Scarpa's work. Scarpa's sole draftsman, Lucini Zinato, explains this balance well: "Scarpa would arrive at an idea at midday and spend the next three months refining it," and at the same time, how this project "became a game — they had clearly realized they enjoyed working together." In fact, Mazzariol supervised the completion of the garden because Scarpa, by that time, had become involved in other projects. If the architect's relationship with the client seems to belong to another era, Scarpa's pleasant relationship with the building crew was without doubt of that very era. As Richard Murphy explains in his meticulous study of this project:
The absence of industry has prolonged craftsmanship [in Venice]. This characteristic of the city was the complete precondition and prerequisite for the success of each of his projects. Scarpa not only demanded and expected a high quality of craftsmanship, he also endeavored to employ the same consistent team again and again, both in Venice and beyond. Scarpa needed to establish a verbal and visual relationship with the craftsman. He abhorred the regulated modern division of labor between the act of design and construction: in his view, the two could not be autonomous. The Querini Stampalia "team" was the same group used on many of his projects: Servio Anfodillo for carpentry, Paolo Desanon for metalwork, Silvio Fasi poured the concrete, and Eugenio De Luigi produced the famous Venetian lustrous plaster render for the interior plaster frames.
The plan seems straightforward: a small bridge, over the Santa Maria canal, extends from Santa Maria Formosa Square to the ground floor of this grand palazzo. Scarpa arranged the sequence of ground-floor rooms to open toward the rear garden. As is the case with most of Scarpa's projects, the scale of his intervention is modest: the enclosed section is only 65 by 40 feet, while the garden dimensions are 80 by 40 feet. Despite the small scale of the intervention, Scarpa took great pains to distinguish three circulation paths. A formal route proceeds directly from the canal, with a series of steps terminating at the main gallery and garden. A more ordinary public route crosses the bridge and reaches the vestibule, then connects to the formal gallery and garden route. Finally, a separate service route links the lane to the garden through a gate and to the service closet through a door. The Querini Stampalia dispels the common misconception that Scarpa lacked the discipline necessary to maintain a clear organizational structure in his projects; Scarpa divided the renovation into a central formal zone with a public zone to its right and a service zone to its left. Scarpa's organization also describes the common plan geometries (4-square, in which the absent fourth square has been transferred to the entry system and placed there, and 9-square, in which the absent eighth and ninth service squares have been transferred to the landscaped garden area). But one diagram remains — the double squares, which flicker through the entry portico, gallery, and garden. Instead of simply emphasizing a single square with its reassuring insistence on a center, there are two squares, one apparently the shadow of the other, and its companion the reflection. In any case, a strange displacement is concealed in the building's organization, as though Scarpa
had inscribed coherent geometries upon an unstable liquid surface. And here, it seems to me, a more precise observation can be made about Scarpa's method of working: that the plan maintains a loose dependence on geometries that are both immediately recognizable and, upon closer observation, vaguely unsettling; simultaneously, the details have preserved their own singular pictorial resonance, a resonance independent of technical expediency or larger summary axioms. Scarpa, moving against the prevailing Modernist concepts of his time, did not insist that the plan is the generator of the project and formulates a logic that commands all aspects of a building. Instead, Scarpa regarded the plan as a kind of blunt fellow who, apart from a few marginal remarks, is playfully silent, and allows the details to come to center stage, with all their theatrical flourishes and comical anxieties. For Scarpa, ornament — the torment of academic Modernism — is the key. Very well then, let us take a walk.
The Querini Stampalia adjoins the small square of Santa Maria Formosa, not far from Piazza San Marco, but far enough from the square's static and relentless tourism to manage a degree of calm. The Foundation's facade is not particularly striking, its finish distinguished from its adjacent neighbors only by its reddish undertone. Strangely, what attracts attention is a railing. To reach the Foundation from the square, one must first cross the Rio di Santa Maria, and although two bridges offer themselves (a mysterious doubling even at the outset), Scarpa's bridge draws us toward it with a railing of gleaming teak. The railing appears to be suspended above the canal; the delicate grain of the teak has a golden-brown luster, and amid all that gray stone and plaster, it is a living entity. Scarpa has strangely configured the railing for the grasping of a hand and has joined the teak to special brass fittings of the nautical kind, providing both a visual and a tactile emphasis; brass, more than wood, transmits different degrees of air temperature. In this moment, Scarpa, with great respect, takes our hand. The twin of this bridge now appears as an ugly double. The stone structure beneath the bridge, its loose paving stones, and its marble balustrade are no match for the more Asian construction of arched steel and larch stair treads. The ugly twin is of the common Venetian type and, as if by duty, preserves the narrative of the campo's stability. Scarpa's bridge, on the other hand, signals in advance with sound and image: the softer tap-tap of shoes on wood and the shimmer of light reflected from the spaced stair treads. The railing nudges once more. We follow its path from teak to steel bracket to steel post, to a second bracket, to that double bracket. Each transition expresses a fundamental structure: the dialogue of load and support, the conversion of horizontal to vertical. Yet at the final sensitive connection of bracket to bridge, there is nothing; the double brackets simply curve and vanish into the gap of the veneer, where steel, in a series of flexible plates, abandons all pretenses of framing. We know that steel, at the time of fabrication, is poured in a molten liquid state, but it is rarely detailed with such fluid nonchalance. A bit of trickery, this final connection, like Shakespeare's fool, dissolves habit: it demands attention and then, confronted by an onslaught of nonsense and a kind of valedictory jest, retreats. Indeed, something stranger is happening. This is an odd bridge; the crown of the bridge is accented with a prominent elliptical bolt connection, and the elevation of the campo is higher than that of our destination. Scarpa, by eliminating the connection of stone to steel and raising the campo boundary with
Istrian steps, instead of openly seeking steel in the campo, subtly pulls the rug out from under this difference. The destination is stranger still: a window (not a door) in a wall (that is crumbling) with the palazzo's basement clearly behind it. And the window frame, which we encounter, contains within it a double door. These doors once again present us with steel, but in a different guise: cold, heavy, handles rusted, very hard and tightly woven and ringed — the doors pinch us, push us forward, and close with a clang. With the sudden acceleration of effects, we are inside. Gaston Bachelard writes: "And as for the cellar... without a doubt, uses will be found for it. It is rationalized and its advantages enumerated. But above all else, it is the dark entity of the house, the entity that partakes of subterranean forces; when we dream there, we are in harmony with the irrationality of the depths." It is obvious that Bachelard wrote this in the comfort of a bright second-floor study, because the vestibule of the Querini Stampalia Foundation is a difficult space to harmonize with any expectation — indeed, it thwarts it. The low vestibule, with a kind of sudden compression, contrasts with the expanse of the bridge. Its ceiling is clad with De Luigi's lustrous plaster, and its reddish-brown veins flow from the depths of successive plaster layers, intensifying the subterranean quality. The inverted plaster wall frames seem to have been forgotten; their connections are in the middle wall and blur the corners, as though the space were continuous. The absence of the horizontal lustre of their twin — the plaster wall finish — is like a dull, gray, wrinkled skin, and the water stains at the lower edges make it clear that it will eventually collapse. Small channels run around the edges of the vestibule floor, defining it as a kind of small campo surrounded by waterways that protect it against the high tide. The marble tiles are also delicate, and as an undifferentiated enclosure, are constructed in homage to the paintings of Josef Albers, just as the ceiling is indebted to the paintings of Mark Rothko. Yet the reflective surface of the tile vividly recalls the surface of water, and the configuration of campo and channel also evokes a pool. Is the vestibule a protection against water, or is something more cunning at work? And what are we to make of the strange door? Whose brass veneer gleams in the vestibule, and whose crooked peculiar latch is punctuated with ring clips? Once again, Scarpa engages us physically, testing our expectations, and we gradually discern the folding mechanism of the door and open its leaves, and light glints and flashes from its surface — and we discover what treasure lies behind it? An electrical closet. Light from the formal entry flows undiminished to the other side of the vestibule gateway. The gateway itself is successive layers: stone, glass, plaster, concrete, and finally brick. Scarpa articulates each element of building and history through small misalignments, revealing his respectful additions and joining a dialogue that has long been in progress. A brief pause, a deft and delicate interlude.
Just as the vestibule campo evokes and then denies the simple centrality of a square, the formal entry evokes an axis but then denies its potential symmetries. The axis loses the center of the distant entry and dead-ends in the bare brick wall of the northeast room. It is true, there exists a kind of pairing between the transparencies of the gallery's glass partition wall and the water grilles of the open iron plates, and between the small monument nested in the gallery's glass wall and that human figure ascending the formal staircase. Once again, this relationship does not build confidence through symmetry but disturbs with uncanny twins. Materials reinforce these mysterious reflections: the concrete of the walkway and the Istrian stone are of a similar substance but different in appearance, while the reflective glass and lustrous plaster are similar in appearance but of a different substance. Among the elements there is no soothing restraint, and instead, a kind of competition for position electrifies the space, a space that veers outward, to the canal, and reluctantly inward to the gallery. The walls are bare, the yellow brick of the worn masonry structure, while the floor and ceiling, as they extend toward the canal, layer by layer retreat. The concrete floor is smooth, irregularly marked with control clips and protected with Istrian stone edges, and finally gives way to a cascade of travertine stair treads that flow toward the canal. Above, the ceiling veneer is worn away to reveal the steel structure and set aside the timber infills. Light punctuates both skins: floor light emphasizes the gallery step, while the ceiling lamp settles in, just as the plaster flickers and gives way to fragments of wood. Once again, a strange fluid quality is visible in the details. The ceiling bears water stains and reflects the dappled light of the canal. The Byzantine lattice pattern of the water grille, like rippling water, trickles and shimmers, and dissolves in the brass fittings and the nested three-way curvature. The Istrian stone edge opens and closes and is tossed around — it is never accompanied by the conventional break at corners but rather spirals through them. Once again, we are left wondering: are we on a dock, dry and safe, or have we mistakenly stepped into a font? The strange little monument set within the glass partition apparently seeks to deny the coherent geometry of the double-square volume rather than
to affirm it. Istrian stone appears once more: from column to dado it rounds into a kind of singular figure, erodes into the void of dark glass, and returns to dado and column. The gold inlaid veneer invites the imprint of our fingers; the double squares appear twice, like a kind of talisman. It seems this stone can be opened, as though the corners have had no bearing on its fluid nature. The water is polluted: its sinister blue-green stickiness flickers through the water grille and expires on the stone steps. Make no mistake, we smell the water; a stinking putrid vapor invades the space. Just ahead lies the shelter of the northeast room. But, as our eyes adjust to the damp darkness, it becomes clear that there will be no escape from water. The heavy steel ceiling columns, interlaced with dark green plasterwork, sway above. The plaster wall frames vanish into brick, just as the Ionic columns sink into the drainage font. Once again, the floor has details in opposition to the flood, and given the four-squareness of it, the room, despite the walls, is completed somewhere in the canal. A small staircase reaches the floor, its stone margin a fluid extension of the dock's stone border. The staircase is rarely used. Instead, most people turn back, retrace their steps, circle the monument, and enter the gallery through the adjacent glass partition. At last, here, spatial transparency and freedom from the disturbance of details are established. Calm and contemplation prevail. The smell of the canal, at least, is not so pungent. The building no longer seems to will its own decay and peeling, for here the walls are continuous and possess a reassuring solidity. Directly ahead, through the gallery's glass wall, is a garden. A calm mound of lawn, green edges stretching toward the sun, in this city of dead paving stones, stinking water, and decaying buildings. The way is clear; straight ahead. We simply walk among the columns. Which columns? There are three pairs: Ionic, modern, and ghosts of patterned glass. None are aligned. Whatever may come, water is present behind us — not a good sign. Of course, we descended on our way to the gallery — and the floor covers the wall edges to establish the waterline. We are ankle-height above it. The lawn outside is above this line, but in any event, water rises to our
Portico from the northeast room
ankles. Travertine holds us; the brass-shaped railing ought to establish a line of sight that is maintained and secure. Until we begin to doubt. Amid the luminous blaze of reflections, as the building dissolves in the harsh light, we see that the brass railing is aligned with the crown of the bridge, and the bridge railing is aligned with the ceiling. We see that the precious monument is merely a cover for a radiator whose hard snout protrudes. We recall that the last time we saw travertine was as paving rising from the canal (what is it doing here?) and we recall that travertine is the residue of hot water, laden with minerals, drawn under pressure from the earth, then vaporized, leaving a deposit of calcium carbonate. Travertine is petrified water and looks like it. Scarpa, ever attentive, has here cut the stone against the grain, not along it, as we see in the paving. We no longer walk upon the stone; we are caught in its depths. And that plaster ceiling, which has been there all along, extending uninterrupted from the entry, its glossy surface animated by lights that, like so many water insects, are flung about. We are in a space that replicates the dimensions of the canal we passed through and thought we had left behind. Like a hapless character in an Edgar Allan Poe short story, we are trapped in the basement crypt of an abandoned palazzo, with all its history, references, and suffocating decay. But its light is very beautiful; a golden radiance fills the space. There is now a calm; we are not forcing ourselves through a window or falling off a dock. The mad details and the performance of rapid prods and nightmarish tricks are behind us. It is peaceful. Water is present, of course, but not close enough to frighten us. Close enough to awaken agonizing sensitivities. We can breathe, and it seems the time has come... to float for a while. A strange lightness fills the space. The water that was initially frightening now gently reaches the horizon line. The concrete floor, with a kind of undulating texture, reveals its aggregation of stone. Istrian stone easily and with an undulating pause assesses the concrete along the gallery, and the central bands play against this rhythm, evoking for us a path through which we might swim along, slowly moving forward. We expert swimmers roll, and our shoulders are not locked level
with the ground but rather rotate from side to side. We leave the ground to its own devices. For the floor is no longer a floor; it overlaps with the wall. The horizontal-to-vertical connection is indeterminate; within the travertine, Istrian stone transforms into clear light, and the cream veins of travertine extend horizontally, then vertically. These veins never insist but rather rotate and float, upward and downward, forward and backward. Even the brass railing, somewhere between floor and ceiling, shimmers and disappears in the garden, unanswered and forgotten. For this space, despite its rectangular configuration, denies the insistence of perspective; the garden indicator, offering no response, locks the lines of sight into a focus of attention. Instead, the garden offers an empty field of greenery; the strangely anchored ground is dreamily driven and floated. And a kind of murmur, a kind of faint sound, is established. A kind of sympathy among things. Scarpa's Istrian columns rotate and nod to each other, one with its golden band and the other with its aqueous light. These columns bow to their Ionic predecessors and respectfully mark the intervals of the half and the third — a calm performance joined by the etched glass. The distant reflection of the water grille appears like a benevolent ghost, signaling that the way out is neither easy nor obvious, and in the end, not so urgent either. Our gaze turns to the margins because, once again, there is no center — only an aimless field of greenery. A second radiator appears and comes to life with a different aspect: its iron body crouches in a hunched posture resembling the Lion of Saint Mark beyond the garden — neither poised to leap nor subject to the positivist rhetoric of technology, nor comedic, but joking about the impotence and unknown passage of the past. A kind of silent sympathy, then: they settle, they purr, they nod at the hearing of tales. For they have a few tales to tell, laden with the lion and its iconic image's significance in Venice, which has dominated as much as the radiator in Modernism's heritage. And both gaze at the Corinthian capital's disheveled mane of the lion and the radiator's teeth — beloved ornaments in the leaf-by-leaf arrangement of the capital. Now the leaf-by-leaf arrangement contrasts with the decayed order of entry, and the unfolded leaf-by-leaf once again reassures us.
These fragments, in the sense of being a mournful reference to a lost singular whole, are in no way fragments. The capital, lion, and radiator are, more precisely, figures. There is no summation scheme, no single direction; only figures with their own resonance, evoking countless narratives, movements, and discoveries. Let me be clear about this: I am telling only one tale, and telling it on a good day. But it seems to me that Scarpa in architecture is not only intelligent and masterful but also generous and magnanimous. For he cannot resist: as we are drawn toward the glass wall and discover that there are three exits (too many), Scarpa presents the final figure. A wall that appears solid and contains a small door within it. The door and its travertine veins swirl this way and that, and its threshold slides to the top of the side walls, opens with a nudge to reveal a second small gallery. A gentle reminder to pay attention, especially against distractions. At last we are outside, in the garden. We arrive at the sunlight and the scent of grass, ivy, linden, and cherry trees. This garden is wrapped rather than bounded, in layers of ivy-covered brick, concrete, and plaster, each sliding this way and past the next without closing at corners. Once again, the empty center is left alone — the green island, circled by a retinue of smaller marginal ornaments. We find these ornaments indirectly: as we walk back and forth, circling the green island in a labyrinth of effects. The same washed concrete paving slides outside, guiding us upward as though we are emerging from water. The Istrian banding of the concrete also flies in the cladding of the vertical concrete partition wall's corners, then comes to life in the flower-laden Corinthian capital. A channel appears, but this time under control: a kind of miniature holding clearer water punctuated with green lilies, water at waist height, inviting us to plunge our hand into the water. The water's source is a labyrinth of gleaming marble, a miniature abstraction of Venice that hovers above the canal, and whose iconic image is answered in the distance by the Lion of Saint Mark. The sounds of water fill the space: the continuous flow from the marble labyrinth, a murmur from somewhere behind the lion, and two barely perceptible splashes. Just above the water flow, behind a small cherry tree, a light emerges — a small lighthouse not aligned with the channel. The accretion of the partition wall, successively worn by water, measures our ascent, even as this wall stumbles away, refusing to solidify, while the colorful glass tiles mark the central line of concrete and destabilize the concepts of above and below. Looking up to the top of the garden wall, we see the articulated steel railing in the form of hooks and circles (up there, are there people too?). All things considered, where is ground level? Where is dry land? It is hard to say. Instead, in a portion of water and sky, there is a strange sense of hovering, while the ground, somewhere in this mix, shifts this way and that. The walkway concrete that supports the wall apparently returns to its original adhesive mixture because of the double, triple corner cladding, and ultimately blurs its own distinct right angles. Water appears once more, and a bronze metal tray overflows with water lilies — now the leaf-by-leaf of vibrant greenery is everywhere. The tray sits within a tiled pool whose configuration and finish recall the vestibule campo. As is often the case in Venice, there is a dead end, bounded by water, a concrete partition wall, and a hedge of hydrangea. We must turn back once more, and we find a strange little staircase recessed into the colonnade entry.
Horizontal lines of the gallery: canal, gallery floor, concrete veneer, railing, photograph and bridge crown, gallery ceiling and bridge railing
Horizontal lines of the garden: gallery floor, lawn, glass tile in the concrete wall, top of the concrete wall, top of the garden wall
Concrete garden partition and bronze water pool
Colonnade steps, well, downspout, and corner piece
The staircase is effectively a set of steps, the hollow metal drumming of the metal stair treads announcing our unauthorized entry into the service section of the garden — a part that, in many architectural strategies, is immune from intrusion, or at least, unpleasant. Instead, we find a third manifestation of water hidden behind the lion and behind a mound of pittosporum plants. The channel leads to a small steel downspout that we can adjust to regulate the flow and sound of the water. Water pours into a spinning pool of marble, plunges into the gap of a concrete post, and beneath the canopy of a fifteenth-century marble wellhead that hovers above, disappears (this one, a strange reservoir). Concrete and stone become aqueous; their connections recede in darkness, and an Istrian doublet confuses their distinct corners. The same stonework dives into the marble pool and, in a kind of doublet in a distant corner, surfaces once more — a Japanese carpentry model of wood that has become a strange fluid geology. A kind of micro-transcendence pours into a fresh aqueous perception of the physical world. Beyond the lawn, the concrete partition wall reveals a gap. We step through a wooden door into the lane — a sturdy lattice of larch timber strips with a tall, narrow steel hinge announcing the act of rotation. Wood joins the catalogue of doors: steel, brass, iron, stone, and glass. Nevertheless, if doors, as Georg Simmel writes, "offer the possibility of stepping out at any moment... a limitation on freedom," a locked door evokes the opposite. All things considered, Scarpa has shaped this promenade as a cloister — a stroll around a sacred center. In countless ways, the garden perimeter is the benevolent twin of the entrance, which is itself
a kind of religious portico. The deliberate chain of the garden's aqueous effects emphasizes the vitalizing power of nature, whereas the portico submits to nature's entropic demons. And the truth is that the gallery is a kind of nave that mediates between these two, or, more optimistically, delivers from one world to the next. Scarpa draws us as unaware novices toward the unity of existential order. But, in this interrogation, we advance by crossing boundaries, not by commanding them. Just beyond the door, a concrete path circles the garden wall. The concrete cover of the path settles into the lawn like so many stepping stones, and seems to untie our shoelaces if necessary. The path cover adapts to the sway of elbows and shoulders and disappears into the short, distant concrete wall, which bends to allow the layered pool to continue like a canal. And another sound is established — a dripping. As we turn behind the wall, or cross the water in the channel, it is as though we are dreaming the benevolent dream of the high tide. We arrive at a thin sheet of water that pours from a narrow stone channel into a shallow pool about a foot in diameter, and then we disappear as if into the source of the garden's fluid counterpoint. Now in the greenhouse courtyard, clearly outside the bounds, we must kneel to contemplate this final aqueous effect. An invitation to splash water on our face and drink the clear, pure water. The pressure of the wall and the overt expression of the paving welcomes a final unauthorized crossing of the lawn. The lawn area has no dominant geometry. Instead, it evokes an endless string of double squares that undulate and shimmer, and dwarfs the countless associations among well, light, channel, lion, door, island, labyrinth, fountain, and baptismal font. All of these
Pool in the greenhouse courtyard
events occur at the margins, the central space that we now occupy, to be more or less reflected upon afterward.
Well, enough with the references to associations, as though architecture were merely a text to be read. And, in this regard, enough with the precious effects, as though architecture were merely a sequence of discrete devices. Although these effects are wondrous, they remain isolated and object-like, demanding cerebral appreciation and tactile participation without combining to create an environmental impact. What do we say about space? If the madly theatrical nature of the entry sequence were released into the gallery's spatial effect — the magnificent, glittering swim — does the parade of occasionally nauseating aqueous effects of the portico evoke a similar effect in the garden? Undoubtedly, the endless heterogeneity of details recedes into the background, or is muffled behind partition walls and plants, or falls below the line of sight. The effects that remain are subdued: the feel of cool grass, the fragrance of cherry trees, the sound of running water, the covering of ivy on brick, the sky overhead. Control weakens; planting submits. Trees and slender shrubs take root within a uniform field of grass and surrender to the encroachment of ivy. Yes, we are standing, but on a strange floating ground that bends vertically in a covering of greenery, a covering that blurs the defining corners and edges. The gallery tilts us toward the horizontal to swim to the grass island, and when we finally arrive, it too bends and releases us into the field of sky's depth. We are tempted to enter, beyond the boundaries, into a moist
situation where the orientations of up and down are unbalanced, and now suspended and wrapped in a green robe and finally, just like that, let us go. But why the surrender again, why the return to small ornaments? Why not go straight and take a shortcut to the lawn? Even in Italy, where one seldom walks on the lawn, there should be a more direct route. Several reasons attract attention: Scarpa's attraction to objects that submit to the craft of making, and the scarcity of commissions, limited his spatial discoveries; Scarpa's attachment to Catholicism reinforced the narrative possibilities of architecture; and undoubtedly, Venice's successive floods strengthened the desire in anyone to grab hold of something solid. Scarpa's details repeatedly evoke a tactile reaction to materials, even under conditions where those materials seem to dissolve. I am divided. Sometimes the garden's environment seems an unnecessary profusion of melodies, and at other times, a necessary bridge to the final piece — lawn. Scarpa, late in his professional life, sometimes set aside his details as "Scarpini," as though they were the earliest expression of his fluid architecture and he recognized that he had to suppress them to realize the full effect of his unique aqueous sensibility. Unfortunately, just as Scarpa's career was gaining momentum, he died. He rests where he considered his masterpiece, the Brion Cemetery. At Scarpa's request, his body was buried in the manner of medieval knights: wrapped in a white robe, facing upward, perpendicular to the ground.
Aerial view of the garden
1- artisan 2- tradesman 3- phrasing 4- craft 5- Finnegans Wake, a novel by James Joyce also famous for its difficult prose. 6- aquatic 7- rhetorical 8- The Origin of the Work of Art 9- phusis 10- earth 11- be 12- being 13- Studies in Tectonic Culture 14- campo 15- terra firma 16- Vandals, a Germanic people who invaded Western Europe and sacked Rome in the fifth century. 17- Realtine, a small archipelago in the northern Adriatic Sea upon which Venice was built. 18- palazzo 19- caranto 20- tide 21- acqua alta, the high tide of the northern Adriatic Sea.
* The text following this title is the translation of one chapter of Michael Cadwell's beautiful book, "Strange Details." The subsequent three chapters are devoted respectively to:
Chapter 2: the Jacobs House by Frank Lloyd Wright
Chapter 3: the Farnsworth House by Mies van der Rohe Chapter 4: the Yale Center for British Art by Louis Kahn
The book begins with a poem by Seamus Heaney titled "Strangeness," which appears as the first editorial note in this issue of Memar. The rich foreword by Nader Tehrani to this book deserves its own consideration. In this era of hollow media rhetoric, reading this book is a gift. If circumstances permit, we hope to publish the translation of this book. Editor-in-Chief, Memar Magazine