Carlo Scarpa
Carlo Scarpa designed this courtroom for civil hearings between 1955 and 56, without a fee. The room, named after Manlio Capitolo, a judge of the Venice court, is on the second floor of the sixteenth-century Fabbriche Vecchie1 building, overlooking the Rialto market2 and the old church of San Giacometto3. In a strange coincidence, during the very period in which Scarpa was working on this court, Scarpa had been summoned before it as a defendant, charged with practising the profession without qualification.
Before designing the courtroom furniture in detail, Scarpa made a specialist study of the activities and needs of the judicial system, extending even to the details of construction, as many of Scarpa's surviving drawings show. Scarpa turned the small room into a highly compact space, with a symmetrical composition repeated in the elements of the furniture and in the materials of the wall and floor coverings. The entrance, at the meeting point of two wide diagonal corridors used by the court offices, had an immediately recognisable front. The opening for a full-height door was divided by a vertical hinge on which two small metal figures rested, a scale and a sword, the symbols of justice, while a square aperture offered a view of the interior.
The courtroom was laid out in three parts: the semicircular bench of the presiding judge at the end, on a raised platform; facing it, two symmetrical rows of benches for the lawyers; and the seating for the public. The order of this arrangement was broken only on the right of the bench, where a memorial tablet of Greek marble occupied a clearly asymmetrical place. Like the entrance and the furnishings, the walls had a continuous cladding of timber panelling; the mahogany boarding, on a module of 11.5 by 7.5 centimetres, was punctuated with copper nails.
Its present excellent state of preservation is the result of careful work by the superintendency for the environment and architecture of Venice in 1995–96, employing the same craftsmen who had originally worked with Carlo Scarpa.
Footnotes:
1- Fabbriche Vecchie
2- Rialto market
3- San Giacometto
Carlo Scarpa: Architecture and Design
