Carlo Scarpa’s Re-designing of Castelvecchio in Verona

This dissertation discusses how architecture approaches history. The main question that will drive the whole argument is 'how do we express our own time in a historic environment without diluting the significance and integrity of that environment'?

Carlo Scarpa (1906-1978) is an Italian architect whose methodology and approach to architecture was not appreciated until after his death , although, recently, his method and works are admired as Modernist-Regionalist architecture. This dissertation discusses, explores and illustrates the significance of Scarpa’s methodology and holistic approach as an authentic Modernist-Regionalist architect. In particular, this research considers Scarpa’s holistic approach where elaborate objects come together to create an integral, harmonious form. However, none of these elaborate objects has dominance; this is opposite to the philosophy of Modern Movement. Scarpa resolved the issue of heaviness of modern architecture simply by employing the fluid characteristic of water and using local craftsmen and materials. Hence, Scarpa’s inclusive method brought various factors of Modern Movement, traditional architecture and critical regionalism together. Moreover, the process of design in Scarpa’s project is critically evaluated to demonstrate his route from inspiration to invention and then from drafting to crafting. Finally, the way in which he brought all the objects and elements of his design together to make a spatial arrangement of space, is discussed. Therefore, Scarpa’s methodology addressed the crisis of objects in Modern Movement.

2015

This research paper is going to investigate what is the scope and effectiveness of adapting reuse in contemporary architecture. The methodology of this essay is based on the examination of various approaches of John Ruskin, Eugene-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc and Fred Scott and continues with a research on three different masterpieces of restoration. It concludes with a third chapter which is based on the analysis of Varosha district in Cyprus and investigates methods to apply for a proper conservation of the city. Many historic buildings and monuments from previous centuries are unsuitable to be used again because of natural or human damages. By restoring them, new users have the opportunity to experience the nostalgic side of the building and the previous functionality in a new design. For example, Varosha is a Turkish occupied area and after extended bombing and depredation is now remain as a ghost city. The significance of bringing back to life the whole city it comes in comparison with the several approaches on restoration which will be discussed and analyzed further more in the following chapters. There is a complex set of variables and values that makes a building important enough to be restored. It might have a political, historical, sociopolitical or architectural value. This research paper is going to explore how adaptive reuse of historic buildings having these values can be successful with various approaches. In addition, it will conclude that there is not a single correct way to respond to historic buildings but it depends on a set of possibilities and judgment process on a case by case basis. The object of the study is to examine historic buildings which are damaged and reused with a different methodology of conservation and then it concludes with a full analysis of Varosha. This paper reports on four specific case studies of restoration which are located in Berlin, Verona and Athens and Varosha. In each case the building is equally important. Finally, this thesis, finds that there is not a single way to respond to restoration and preservation and there is not one general rule of an intervention in a historical building or monument. The aim of this paper is to prove that adaptive reuse is as equal as other architectural projects which start from the beginning.

Journal of Architectural Education, 2004

Scarpa’s work as a designer has long been narrowly framed as that of an object-fixated architect, whose fascination with rich materials and overly-complex details has overshadowed other aspects of his productive activities. Yet, there is another Scarpa that has yet to be fully explored – a designer for whom landscapes and gardens were intrinsic parts of the design of exhibitions and buildings.The landscapes and gardens Carlo Scarpa (1906-1978) designed are an important yet largely unexamined part of his oeuvre. Several revised surveys of architectural and garden histories evince this oversight, all of which now conclude with his gardens.1 Surveys notwithstanding, recent and more focused studies, including essays on landscape theory, and exhibitions with accompanying catalogues on Scarpa’s work

The architectural community has traditionally ascribed the maxim "God lies in the detail" ro Mies van der Rohe. I The German version of the adage, Der Liebe Gott steckt in Detail perhaps the original source of tvfies's ma..xim, was used by Aby Warburg to indicate the foundation of the iconographical method for researching in art history. The French version has been attributed to Gustave Flaubert, and in this case the maxim indicates a manner or literary produCtion. '2 The common denominator in these different forms and uses indicates that the detail expresses the process of signification; that is, the attaching of meanings to man-produced objects. The details are then the locii where knowledge is of an order in which the mind finds its own working, that is, logos.3

Nexus Network Journal, 1999

Frascari Symposium IV: Kingston School of Art, London, England, 2019

Depict | Demonstrate | Disclose: Drawing 31615 Architectural drawings can be problematic for traditional archives. Unlike paintings, sculptures, and decorative arts, which are accessioned, architectural sketches (and in some cases, drawings) may not. They can be the flotsam and jetsam in an archival terra incognita. Even at the well-organized Centro Carlo Scarpa at Treviso, for example, I’ve encountered uncatalogued or misattributed drawings, absent identifying nomenclature on virtual scraps of paper. Family-owned archives present their own unique challenges. While visiting the apartment Scarpa shared with his wife Nini, at the Villa Palazzetto in Monselice, for example, longtime client and Scarpa friend, Aldo Businaro (who was developing his own archive) opened the drawer of a bedside nightstand. In mid-sentence, he began pulling out A4 sheets covered with Scarpa sketches –heretofore unknown to Businaro. Discovering Scarpa drawings is one thing; access to collections is another matter. When I began researching landscape and garden in the oeuvre of Scarpa two decades ago, I had entry to fewer than 1,000 original drawings: the Castelvecchio archives at Verona, the Fondazione Querini-Stampalia, and the private collections of Guido Pietropoli, Arrigo Rudi, and Aldo Businaro. The remainder, more than 20,000 graphic works of various types and sizes, were stored in the professional office of Tobia and Afra Scarpa in Montebelluna, where they presented Tobia and his then partner/wife Afra, with birthright and burden. In large part, because of this onus on the Scarpas, and the shadow cast by the father on the work of the son, access to the drawings was limited to a handful of former associates and academics. These are the graphic documents that since 2006, constitute the bulk of the collection at the Archivio di Stato di Treviso. The timing of my first research visit to the Museo Castelvecchio archive in 1998, would have been poor had I come to see only the famous “factures,” as Marco Frascari calls them in Eleven Exercises, of Cangrande’s new setting, and Scarpa’s exuberant details. Most were out for cleaning in preparation for the 1999 exhibition at the CCA. Fortunately, my interest lay in the flotsam and jetsam.

The success that the critical concept of the "white cube" has enjoyed since Brian O'Doherty published four eponymous articles in Artforum from 1976 to 1981 hardly needs reiterating. 1 It is a wonderful heuristic tool. In the hands of artists, critics, and journalists, it helped bring about the rise of institutional critique, that collective investigation begun in the later 1960s into the economic, social, and architectural conditions-in short, the apparatus-of art. Its triumph coincided, too, with the critical dismantling of the modernist theory of autonomy identified with Clement Greenberg, which dominated the reception of postwar American art. Within this "white," neutralized space, seemingly suspended out of time and insulated from disruptions from the outside world, O'Doherty identified a set of normative procedures, a system of silent constraints imposed by institutions. As anthropologist Mary Douglas would add, this constraint was all the more effective for its near invisibility: the institution is that which makes its effects felt, without one needing to express them or even be aware of them. 2 And with its gallery walls upholstered in white drill fabric, and its hushed, felted atmosphere conducive to aesthetic contemplation, Alfred Barr's vision of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) was taken by many as the emblematic version of the white cube. Yet the history of the white cube, once incontrovertibly identified with the myth of modern art, is becoming ever more complicated and more ramified, as competing storylines abound and genealogies are no longer so certain. A reconsideration of the field of exhibition studies is already well underway and has helped to unearth a wealth of prewar experiments in museology in such places as Weimar Germany (Hanover, Hamburg, Dresden, and Essen), led by such figures as