Gallo House and Studio, Vicenza, 1962–65
Scarpa had many ties to Vicenza — he had spent his childhood there (1908–19) and returned to live there in 1972 — yet he executed only a few projects, albeit very significant ones, in the city. In the early 1960s, the lawyer Ettore Gallo, through their mutual friendship with Licisco Magagnato, entrusted him with a project to renovate the interior and exterior spaces of Palazzo Brusarosco in Vicenza, which today houses the international library "La Vigna." The existing building had been constructed in the "antique" style in the 1830s, and in 1959, after the war damage from the Second World War bombing had been repaired, another floor had been added (Barbieri, 2003, pp. 143–4). As with the Scatturin House, the property was situated in a historic building — in this case, a three-story main structure — with the aim of creating a studio (archive on the ground floor and offices on the first floor) and a residence (second floor). Moreover, Gallo had defended Scarpa against the accusation of professional hypocrisy, a charge from which he was definitively acquitted in 1965. The most important structural works, designed in collaboration with Carlo Maschietto, concerned the entrance hall and the painting room on the main floor of the palazzo, where compositions of specially designed steel beams were installed beneath the original wooden ceilings. Like the steel beam that extends through the sculpture gallery of Castelvecchio, the supportive function of these new H-beams is inseparable from their playfully theatrical aspect: by detaching the new beams from the walls and resting them on triangular supports, the architect and engineer amused themselves by visually hollowing out the point of greatest structural stress. As for the archive surrounding the entrance hall — housed in a sunken central vault over which two paired reinforced-concrete planters sit, flanked by hammered lime-plastered walls — Scarpa preserved the existing wall divisions but
added new paving, plasterwork, doors, and windows to the building, implementing some of the solutions used in the upper-floor apartment but in a less orderly manner. Compared to Scarpa's other residential designs, this house is distinguished by its superb spatial quality, the starting point of which is the tallest central space, designed to accommodate the family's large painting collection. Here the ceiling, finished in irregular rectangles with a troweled grey cement render, is reminiscent of the geometric composition of Japanese walls to which Scarpa's architecture frequently refers. The undeniable focal point of this "public" section of the house is light, which penetrates through the large hall window and the skylights of the added floor, reflecting off the polished Clauzetto stone floor and wandering across the molded wall surfaces. The "private" rooms are situated at the periphery: the painting rooms and dining room face south, toward the garden, while the bedrooms in the opposite direction possess more intimate dimensions, with timber plank floors. Unlike the Scatturin House, the relationship between one room and another is not mediated by panels or intermediate doors but is direct, achieved through wide, frameless openings whose rounded edges invite passage. Some walls are finished in lustrous lime or surface plaster in green, black, Pompeian red, and grey — recalling the examples from the early 1960s in the Venetian lawyer's house-studio or the Castelvecchio Museum. When the residents vacated the house, they took the family furniture with them, but some of the wardrobes, shelving, floor hatches, and original lamps remain. The garden design, modified under the supervision of Mrs. Ebe Fatturi Gallo, is represented by a signed drawing that displays the same complexity and depth as the gardens of Castelvecchio or the Querini Stampalia Foundation.