Carlo Scarpa

Carlo Scarpa was born in Venice on 2 June 1906. His family lived for a time in Vicenza, where his mother opened a high-fashion dressmaking workshop; back in Venice in 1919, he entered the Academy of Fine Arts, meaning to become a painter. He then chose architecture and in November 1926 earned the diploma of professor of architectural drawing, but not an architect's degree: the gap led to two complaints for practising illegally, in 1956 and 1960, from which he was cleared in 1965. Under Guido Cirilli he studied materials, from the noblest to the humblest, and the techniques that bring out their qualities. He then designed glass for the Cappellin glassworks in Murano and, from 1932 to 1947, for Paolo Venini.

In 1935 he received an important commission: the restoration of Ca' Foscari (1935-1937). After the war, exhibition design made his name: Biennale fit-outs until 1972, Palazzo Abatellis in Palermo (1953-1954), the Possagno gypsotheca (1955-1957), the Olivetti showroom in Piazza San Marco (1957-1958) and the Fondazione Querini Stampalia (1959-1963). At the Querini, water enters the building and the light it reflects vibrates on the ceilings; at Possagno, corner windows tie the hall to the hills and a pool reflects the light. The Castelvecchio museum in Verona, reworked in three phases from 1958, is regarded as his museographic masterpiece. His language grows from the dialogue between materials, detail drawing, the calibration of colour and light, and an idea of architecture as a narrative. Wright, Le Corbusier, Aalto and Kahn served him as models; his motto was 'if you don't know, copy'; Eastern culture, which had attracted him since his youth, remained a constant source of inspiration; he first went to Japan in 1969.

One of his last great projects was the Brion memorial at San Vito d'Altivole, commissioned by the widow of Giuseppe Brion and built between 1970 and 1978: a funerary garden where concrete is the leitmotif, handled with Renaissance 'sprezzatura', and where water gushes, stands still and gathers in small pools. Scarpa taught for fifty years at the Iuav, which he directed from 1972 to 1974, and received the Olivetti prize for architecture (1956) and later the gold medal for merit in education, culture and the arts (1977). He died in Sendai, Japan, on 28 November 1978, and lies at San Vito, between the old cemetery and the Brion tomb, as he had wished. His archive holds more than 40,000 documents on about 330 projects.