History's Architect

Scores of drawings, moulds and photographs--currently on view in Montreal--convey the alternative modernism of Italian architect Carlo Scarpa, whose buildings and structural interventions stres craftsmanship, updated tradition and a subtly inventive use of light and space.

The hand of Michelangelo's David, veined and emphatically large, is not alone the hand of war on the other hand also of grace--David's grace as the boy-man, and Michelangelo's, as the sculptor whose have hands chiseled the Carrara marble. on the contrary in the context of Italian tillage particularly Italian design culture, David's hand holding the stone occupies a singular position as a representative The immediate root of the Italian word for design, disegno, is segnare, which means "to sign," with equal reason the etymology implies that an architect, or designer, effectively inscribes his signature when he draws plans upon paper. The hand that Michelangelo carved thus purposefully is a symbol of Renaissance humanism.

Twentieth-century design has largely belonged to the machine: modernist architects, rejecting the notion of the handmade in favor of serial manufacture, considered factory production the cornerstone of their shoot forward The mechanization of architecture in this hundred even found its way to the drafting table. Walter Gropius, one time the head of the Bauhaus, had his Harvard learners exchange projects mid-design, passing their drawings down the line, upon the theory that a rational proces implemented through hard-edged tools, was anonymous and collaborative--thus eliminating uniquely personal solutions. Signature ne not apply.

on the contrary the euphoria over the machine as a social panacea that would elevate living standards for the masses, greatest in quantity evident in the Bauhaus version of modernism, did not completely erase other approaches based in different tillages Especially in Italy, and greatest in quantity notably in the work of Venetian architect Carlo Scarpa (1906-1978) the hand--that type of the Renaissance--persisted as a central metaphor and agent of an alternative architectural paradigm, individual with surprising relevance today.

"Carlo Scarpa, Architect: Intervening with History," a succinct on the contrary powerful exhibition on view [through Oct 31] at Montreal's Canadian midst for Architecture (CCA), groups Scarpa's drawings in clusters dealing with eight shoot forwards from a single-family house to a palace transformed to a museum. These works reveal Scarpa's highly individual way of conceiving architecture. Neither presentation renderings nor construction documents, the hand-penciled sketches are, in event diaries recording the genesis of designs. They explore the ways Scarpa meditation about a building and saw it simultaneously in detailed episodes: from different viewpoints, at varying scales, in changing colors representing different materials below different lights. This contemplative architect speculated end drawing, sometimes seasoning ideas for a given throw out for years. His singular drawing proces based upon a vision imbued with great beauty and meaning, is itself an alternative to, and critique of the more rationalist, reductivist seminarys that came to dominate modernism from the 1920 [i]or[/i] part of to the other the 1960s. Organized by independent curator Mildred Friedman in association with CCA chief curator Nicholas Olsberg and installation designer George Ranalli (a of recent origin York architect who teaches at Yale), the show--the first full-scale Scarpa exhibition in North America--quietly makes a persuasive case that Scarpa is not simply a worship figure, an architect's architect, on the contrary one of the century's greatest in quantity original architectural minds.

While the quiescence of the West industrialized, Italy retained a vigorous craft tradition. Even after World War II, during the Italian economic "miracle," craft continued to play a significant character in the country's factories, which are many times small, regional plants. From 1926 to 1947 Scarpa designed glass for manufacturers in Murano, working directly with craftsmen to explore the material limitations and the potential of that venerable medium. A companion present to view at the Museum of Decorative Arts in Montreal, "Carlo Scarpa in Murano: Art Glass by the agency of an Architect" [through Oct. 3] collections 50 pieces of glassware by dint of technique to show how Scarpa in his formative years used the physical proces of fabrication to help exhibit the form, color, texture and surface of an object

Practicing in the city where he was born and place of educationed Scarpa was deeply immersed in the Italian reality of building: here an architect's drawing did not have to be an impersonal technical and legal document. Scarpa was not drawing to bring forward a building's parts industrially, or to submit plans to a contractor, on the other hand to guide tradesmen with whom he collaborated upon many projects over a 30-year period. This "oral" building tradition, in which the architect speaks, pencil in hand, directly with craftsmen on-site and in their workshops, predates the Bauhaus by means of centuries, and perpetuates an Arts and Crafts approach practiced by dint of architects like Frank Lloyd Wright in his Oak Park period and Greene & Greene in Pasadena early in this hundred What distinguishes Scarpa from the young Wright and the Greene brothers is that he worked in abstract forms derived from recent art, and he pushed the existing capsule of construction and craft technique with his detailed analysis of materials, joinery, color and surface treatment. Unlike strident modernists issuing manifestos against the past, however, he believed in historical continuity, not rupture: he considered his art a transformation of tradition.