gipsoteca del canova, canova plaster cast gallery extension, possagno 1955-57.
architect: carlo scarpa 1906-1978 with valeriano pastor.
to understand the scale, you must know that the woman to the right is the tiniest italian guide, I have ever seen. on its own, the museum is a small building, and size along with thoughtful articulation is an obvious part of its attraction. there was something else on my mind during my visit, though, and perhaps the american architects can see it from here; a number of qualities to this buildings that relate specifically to the U.S.
and no, it is not scarpa's preoccupation with frank lloyd wright which is not all that outspoken here anyway, unless we consider this a particularly playful take on unity temple. no, it is something else, found in the shifted grids of the plan, in the sudden and machine-like symmetry of parts, in those determined corner windows that take a piece off the roof too, in the layered composition of spaces and walls, and in those highly idiosyncratic tectonics.
if this is not the beginning of morphosis, of thom mayne, rotondi and those related, it is certainly an important influence that helped deliver them from post-modernism and into a revived modernism. they have come a long way since then, but those corner windows are hard to forget.
and they were not alone. scarpa's impact in america in the 1990's was far greater than in europe where his influence was probably mostly on exhibition design. lessons from scarpa were important to the works of tod williams and billie tsien, the steven holl of st. ignatius and even, as we saw the other day, rural studio.
or perhaps you can produce a more reasonable list of names?
the scarpa set.
Tags: carlo scarpa carlo scarpa gipsoteca del canova possagno italy museum exhibition skylight architecture venice venezia modernism modernist arquitectura architektur arkitektur arquitetura Architectuur Architettura jenskristianseier seier+seier creative commons CC
gipsoteca del canova, canova plaster cast gallery extension, possagno 1955-57.
architect: carlo scarpa 1906-1978 with v. pastor.
I forget if this was a boy or a girl, apologies to all. stay strong.
what it shows us, what it also shows us, is the strange principle of natural light which scarpa applied in his extension of the gipsoteca. not only did he place canova's plaster casts - a slightly ghostlike material in itself - in all-white surroundings, he cut openings for daylight in every wall and every corner of the rooms. occasional streaks of sunlight will wash over the sculptures and articulate their shapes, but more often than not, as in these afternoon photos, the light will bounce off the white walls in endless reflections around the room, obliterating all shadows.
convention dictates that light in a situation like this should come from one direction, shadows clarifying the three dimensional play of shapes, and that it should never be direct given the corroding powers of its UV component. but in possagno, scarpa does not even play with the expectations of convention.
it made me think of his preoccupation with wright who alone was able to place three or four different light sources in one room. but light in wright dies quickly, his use of darker, self-finishing materials like brick or ply allow for little more than a single reflection, and the light becomes more of a local incident, defining a room within the room.
scarpa's light in possagno encounters no such obstacles and fills the space evenly. the white world he built around these idealised human figures is frustratingly ambiguous. it is at once a dreamlike, ethereal setting sympathetic to the sculptor's equally dream-like world where the exhibition comes to life under random rays of sunlight, but it is also - and at the same time - the unforgiving, modern light of the surgery, exposing every black measuring point placed by canova, leaving nothing to the shadows, to imagination, suggestion. for all the visual interest of the building, scarpa is denying canova the colour and texture we would expect to find in a work of his; he is draining the space of the sensuality and richness that would typically form a backdrop to canova's sculptures.
and scarpa wanted the light to be both. there is a kitsch aspect of pretty details to canova's work which I am not sure we have the culture to spot today, at least not without a guide, but to which scarpa responded sharply. in the words of the architect:
'...the problem is that during that time, predominately napoleonic, the taste for heads, legs, and feet was very affected, almost "greek", following winkelmann's enthusiasm for greek art. it is the taste for curly hair - you can still see this in second-rate films - that taste for the neoclassic that makes antonio canova appear unsavoury. one would have to do something, perhaps take a risk with the statues - break off hands, feet, and heads, the points where there are thongs, cothurni, and ringlets. it's here one finds the neoclassical style, whereas from the neck down to the knees is the true style, truth achieved, art that becomes life.'
have you ever heard a museum architect be so harsh on the subject of his exhibition? this is scarpa the reader of ruskin, nietzsche and karl kraus speaking to us. his critical appreciation of an artist or a work of art was the starting point for an architecture more cerebral than I think many of his fans are willing to concede, and more difficult than his own neat details would have you think.
I felt the hostility, let us call it that, and could not make sense of it on this my second visit to the building. but scarpa wanted to give us more than the infatuation that invariably colours the first meeting with his architecture, and second visits are a blessing of the headache-inducing kind. nabokov went as far as to say that for books there are only rereadings, the first reading simply does not count. in scarpa, we have an equally demanding teacher.
pretty canova on flickr:
www.flickr.com/photos/65986072@N00/458768613/
www.flickr.com/photos/robertomberna/577518839/
www.flickr.com/photos/26602223@N00/8961537953/
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the scarpa set.
Tags: carlo scarpa carlo scarpa gipsoteca del canova possagno italy museum exhibition sculpture skylight architecture venice venezia modernism modernist arquitectura architektur arkitektur arquitetura Architectuur Architettura seier+seier creative commons CC
gipsoteca del canova, canova plaster cast gallery extension, possagno 1955-57.
architect: carlo scarpa 1906-1978 with v. pastor.
more white on white. but where are the shadows?
the scarpa set.
Tags: carlo scarpa carlo scarpa gipsoteca del canova possagno italy museum exhibition sculpture skylight architecture venice venezia modernism modernist arquitectura architektur arkitektur arquitetura Architectuur Architettura seier+seier creative commons CC
gipsoteca del canova, canova plaster cast gallery extension, possagno 1955-57.
architect: carlo scarpa 1906-1978 with v. pastor.
we are looking at the space carlo scarpa set up for canova's three graces, bathing them in natural light at the end of the narrow gallery which concludes his extension. I cannot help thinking that there would have been a gift shop, had it been built more recently.
the angle allows us a good look at the three walls, not quite parallel, of different height, length, and materials that define this space. not least the relationship between the wall of the old museum and the low, new wall next to it is interesting, scarpa using the natural stone that the old wall only mimics.
none of other walls of the extension are in natural stone; this is an early instance of scarpa's increasingly collage-like approach to architecture which provided him with a great freedom to create connections and correspondances across time, space and cultures - or, as in this case, with the neighbouring building.
the scarpa set.
Tags: carlo scarpa carlo scarpa gipsoteca del canova possagno italy museum exhibition skylight architecture venice venezia modernism modernist arquitectura architektur arkitektur arquitetura Architectuur Architettura seier+seier creative commons CC
gipsoteca del canova, canova plaster cast gallery extension, possagno 1955-57.
architect: carlo scarpa 1906-1978 with v. pastor.
view from the south.
to the right is the original, 19th century museum. the rooms of scarpa's extension are articulated almost as individual buildings and follow the the outline of earlier houses on the site, giving us an example of the layered compositions he would later be famous for.
even if this layering is less extreme than in scarpa's final buildings, the elements of his architecture are carefully drawn apart and given their individuality before being assembled. the windows are the obvious example here, most are highly original takes on the modernist corner window, physically lifted out of the walls they would normally be set in. I count five distinctly different light sources in this photo alone - and remember that the interior is one continuous, unfolding space.
but we should also look at the walls. right to left, we find three walls that are not quite parallel, not of the same height, and not built in the same way. the first one is the imposing outer wall of the first museum. its detailing and decoration is entirely conventional, but it gains its presence from sheer size.
the second wall, at a distance from the old museum, delineates the new building but does little else. it does not support anything other than itself (the roof being supported on a steel beam). yet it gains an expression of equal intensity to its much larger neighbour by being in natural stone, almost as if it were a found wall.
at an angle and at a different height is finally the main wall of scarpa's extension, separated into a concrete frame and a rendered, blank wall. I believe scarpa is creating a syntactical relationship between the separated parts which is as strong, albeit very different from, similar walls united in a traditional box. we often talk about this, especially in the later works, using words like fragments or fragmentation, but there are negative connotations to words like these that are not true of the architecture they are meant to represent.
(the steel mullions in the window facing the three graces are not original, if I remember correctly. I think they were hardwood when I saw them first some twenty years ago).
the scarpa set.
Tags: carlo scarpa carlo scarpa gipsoteca del canova possagno italy museum exhibition skylight architecture venice venezia modernism modernist arquitectura architektur arkitektur arquitetura Architectuur Architettura seier+seier creative commons CC
