Materials and Meaning in Architecture

Essays on the Bodily Experience of Buildings

Nathaniel Coleman

• Editore: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
• Anno: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781474287739
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Architecture
• Categoria: History of Architecture

Interweaving architecture, philosophy and cultural history, Materials and Meaning in Architecture develops a rich and multi-dimensional exploration of materials and materiality, in an age when architectural practice seems otherwise preoccupied with image and visual representation. Arguing that architecture is primarily experienced by the whole body, rather than chiefly with the eyes, this broad-ranging study shows how the most engaging built works are as tactile as they are sensuous, communicating directly with the bodily senses, especially touch. It explores the theme of 'material imagination' and the power of establishing 'place identity' in an architect's work, to consider the enduring expressive possibilities of material use in architecture. The book's chapters can be dipped into, each individual chapter providing close readings of built works by selected modern masters (Scarpa, Zumthor, Williams and Tsien), insights into key texts and theories (Ruskin, Loos, Bachelard), or short cultural histories of materials (wood, brick, concrete, steel, and glass). And yet, taken together, the chapters build to a powerful book-length argument about how meaning accrues to materials through time, and about the need to reinsert the bodily experience of materiality into architectural design. It is thus also, in part, a manifesto: arguing for architecture to act as a bulwark against the tide of an increasingly depersonalised built environment. With insights for a wide range of readers, ranging from students through to researchers and professional designers, Materials and Meaning in Architecture will cause theorists to rethink their assumptions and designers to see new potential for their projects.

PART ONE

Stones, Architecture, Land and Interiors

Chapter 4

Time Silted Up: Scarpa at the Gipsoteca Canoviano (1955–57) and Museo di Castelvecchio (1957–75)

Italian architect Carlo Scarpa’s (1906–78) method could be summarized as situated, autobiographical and poetic. Best known for constructing an evocative poetics of building out of intense details, and the inventive use of materials, his work gathers past into present with a Janus glance backward towards fading traditions and forward towards unspecified futures.¹ The conditions and qualities of Scarpa’s architecture are concisely rendered as ‘a history of materials and the work of the hand’, in which

the materials, and even more the use he makes of them in every phase of his development are a telling of the truth. The figure of the ruin, the decay of bodies, all bodies, which Carlo learned in the readings of his Venetian days – Venice being the great text of decomposition – reappears in the way he exposes materials to weather and history without any pretense of compassion.²

In Scarpa’s work, past coalesces into figurations of an eternal present, which deepens and gentles the mystery of death (including at the Brion Cemetery). Although the Brion Family Tomb complex, San Vito d’Altivole, Italy (1969–78), is perhaps Scarpa’s best-known work, his gallery and exhibit designs, including display cases, pedestals and hardware, reveal the full extent of his craft sensitivities, elaborated on in presenting diverse artworks from a range of periods.

Scarpa’s galleries, including the Museo di Castelvecchio (1957–64; 1968–69; 1973–75), Verona, Italy, and the Museo Canoviano Gipsoteca (1955–57), Posagno, Italy, recuperate relationships between architecture and the fine arts broken by the rationalization of design, reduction of building to an industrial process and the atomization of art. In his work, architecture, painting and sculpture are reunited by details, colour, material, building elements and display apparatus, mediated by the body. By piercing veils separating spectators from artworks, architects from art and the public from the processes of the artist, his galleries heighten emotional experiences and bodily perceptions of art.

Figure 4.1 Museo Canoviano Gipsoteca (1955–57), Posagno, Italy. Carlo Scarpa, Architect. [Photo: Nathaniel Coleman, 2007].

Figure 4.2 Museo di Castelvecchio (1957–64; 1968–69; 1973–75), Verona, Italy. Carlo Scarpa, Architect. [Photo: Nathaniel Coleman, 2007].

Scarpa and locality

Scarpa’s localness is unmatched by almost any noteworthy post-Second World War architect: he built only in Italy, mostly in the provinces of Veneto, especially Venice. Working regionally deepened his practices, even as the dissipating tendencies of globalization came to dominate contemporary imaginaries. Although cosmopolitanism fosters broader perspectives possibly prerequisite for species and planetary survival, it diffuses cultural specificity, producing a conundrum: emplaced practices can give rise to more profound results but localness risks becoming enervating provincialism, analogous to insipid globalism.³

Figure 4.3 Brion Family Tomb complex (1969–78), San Vito d’Altivole, Italy. Carlo Scarpa, Architect. [Photo: Nathaniel Coleman, 2007].

Staying local guarantees nothing but might sustain those qualities that first distinguished an architect, as it did for Scarpa, even as tensions between local and global, as between tradition and modernity, enriched his work. Rooted in a place and modes of production, while participating in the metropolitan currents of modern art, Scarpa interpreted traditions with a rare degree of cultural depth and fluency. The tense play of these contradictions were a source of his work’s vitality.

Though an Italian architect, Scarpa’s self-identification as a ‘man of Byzantium who came to Venice by way of Greece’ disclosed his hunger for the world.⁴ Originating in ‘Byzantium’ is a place time reference, conjuring up the ancient Greek colony that in late Roman, and Eastern Roman, or Byzantine, periods (330–1453) became the city of Constantinople (the Second Rome, now Istanbul, Turkey). Then as now, a bridge between Europe and Asia, linking East and West. Identifying ‘Greece’ as his transit way from Byzantium to Venice is as much a temporal as a geographical reference to ancient Greece. Venetian birth (dying in Sendai, Japan, seventy-two years later) infused his imaginaries with the Eastern Roman Empire (Byzantium). A Republic between the fifth and eighteenth centuries, Venice’s strong trading ties with the Byzantine Empire marked the city with distinct Eastern influences.

His East/West (Occidental/Oriental) sensibility, originating in the Venetian archipelago, is a localized biographical detail suggestive of play with tradition as a method for resisting the economic imperatives of off-the-shelf ready-made components, and projects determined by performance specifications. Even architects concerned with details mostly construct distantly cool atmospheres cognate with industrialized mass production but Scarpa’s adoration of the joint and love of material mediated ancient sources to fabricate architectural machines for engendering detailed immediacy. Assembled from elements bridging past and future, and part and whole, the physicality of his architecture is manifest resistance to dominant modes of production, still modelling alternative practices for architects.⁵

US architect Louis I. Kahn’s meditation on Scarpa concentrates on his method as a poetics of joints. In Scarpa’s work, ‘Beauty’, ‘Art’ and ‘Wonder’ are indivisible in manifestations of ‘the inner realization of “Form”’, as a sense of ‘wholeness’ construed from ‘inseparable elements’: materials as much as ‘shapes’. It is the joint, however, that renders the ‘whole’ of ‘inseparable elemen ts’ comprehensible as such: ‘In the elements the joint inspires ornament, its celebration. The detail is the adoration of Nature.’⁶

Venetian clues

The key elements of Scarpa’s architecture – metal, wood, stone, glass and water – originate in Venice as demonstrations of ancient denotation, persistently open to modern connotation.⁷ Decay, stucco falling off brick, headless and/or weather-beaten statues, wind-swept stone, crumbling marble strapped together with bits of iron, bridges of stone, of stone and metal, of metal, of wood and metal and the defining play of light and water everywhere are his lexicon of material presence, cultivated in the fertile soil of associations that nourished his detail imaginaries. Material fragments embedded in ancient walls throughout Venice bridge time, structuring encounters with various pasts that a multitude of presents negotiate, suggestive of open futures. He cultivated the ground of his work in two senses: turning the earth to urge growth, and through increasing sophistication. A living past was his ground of radical invention, laden with constellations of perpetually renewable significance, translated by transgressive modes of interpretation. Details in particular – redolent with Venetian decay – were his method for recuperating something of architecture’s classical fine arts tradition.

Suggestive of the tragic Venetian mood infusing Scarpa’s work, Ruskin believed the long decline of Venice, following the 1797 fall of its Republic, so enhances its fatal beauty as to make it a successor to the Garden of Eden:

like her in perfection of beauty, though less in endurance of dominion, is still left for our beholding in the final period of her decline: a ghost upon the sands of the sea, so weak – so quiet, so bereft of all her loveliness, that we might doubt, as we watched her faint reflection in the mirage of the lagoon, which was the City, and which the shadow.⁸

Transformed through time, including to accommodate visitors like Ruskin, Venice maintains an overwhelming atmosphere of perpetual mourning and corporeal pleasure; as eternal commemorations of human ingenuity. Despite the touristic throng, Scarpa’s details are spectres of the city’s enduring seductiveness. As the living record of its own demise, Venice is a great city of death, heralding inescapable individual finality as life affirming. Tracing this, dramatic tensions between tragedy and comedy play out continuously in Scarpa’s work.

Echoing Venice, Scarpa’s work mediates life and death by embracing mortality as a source of deepened existence and vitality, built upon fragility and certain decay: a simultaneously elegiac and exultant character the Brion Family Tomb powerfully embodies. Determined, disciplined and rigorous, but mostly supple; jokes of displacement appear throughout his work, locating it within an ambit of surrealism.⁹ Dislocation of near-sacred antique objects, as at the Querini-Stampalia Foundation Garden (1961–1963), liberates cultural inheritances by reintroducing them to everyday life.

Figure 4.4 Querini-Stampalia Foundation Garden (1961–63), Venice, Italy. Carlo Scarpa, Architect. [Photo: Nathaniel Coleman, 2007].

Joining seemingly irreconcilable materials – perishable wood and durable metal, for example – heightens senses of things by displacing them. Estrangement disrupts expected perception, thereby returning something of the original shock of initial contact, while sustaining refreshing defamiliarization through subsequent encounters.¹⁰

As practical applications of his method, Scarpa’s museum and gallery interventions demonstrate how his dichotomous modernism refreshes encounters with historic artworks by disobediently playing with the past. Tradition is never simply received but is tilled to form tangible records of its material presence in new work. Accordingly, newness is built upon ground originally cultivated in the past, to form the foundation of future work. Scarpa’s material meditations are future-orientated transformations of physical presence that structure reflections on possibilities beyond the given.

Accounting for otherness

Despite his pessimism about post-Second World War architecture, Italian architectural historian and theorist Manfredo Tafuri (1935–94) praised Scarpa for his incomparable escape from capitalism’s foreclosure on architectural possibility, which makes him deserving of careful study. But, according to Tafuri, his singular achievement is non-transferable, making his relative autonomy an anomaly, in comparison with most architects, who are tormented by false ‘hopes in design’ and are little more than technicians in a building industry:¹¹

The detachment of the ‘outmoded’ threw light on collective and subjective situations and allowed (or stimulated?) ‘the courage to speak of roses.’ Historiographical treatment must be suspended in the case of such golden, isolated individuals, and give way to ‘classical’ monographs.¹²

As another kind of architect, Scarpa operates beyond historical materialism, resisting both historiography and dominant modes of production, necessi...