Back to the (retro)future: Carlo Scarpa’s modernist Venice

This article is part of a new guide to venice by FT Globetrotter

If there’s one city you don’t visit for its modern architecture, you might think it would be Venice: the alluring Serenissima, seemingly floating, ethereal and eternal, with its cityscape completely recognizable to a 17th-century visitor. However, you would be wrong. Because the city that somehow manages to overcome a million clichés actually reveals a rich modernist vein.

It is the work of architect Carlo Scarpa, who throughout his life carried out a series of interventions that are both radically modern and also subtly evocative. His reservoir of ideas about how to work within the delicate fabric of history remains a cult object in the profession.

Scarpa was born in Venice and spent much of his childhood in nearby Vicenza. His work, at its best, weaves together threads of history, science fiction, brutalism, classicism and art deco. He gives occasional hints of Frank Lloyd Wright and the Viennese secessionist Josef Hoffmann. Its small jewels of modernism join together the fragments of the palazzi that fade and sink into braids of pure beauty.

Most are also easy to access, almost instantly recognizable (once you get the hang of it) and offer a stimulating change of scenery from all those Rococo altarpieces and Ruskinian Gothic arches.

1. Olivetti showroom (1957-58)

Piazza San Marco 101, 30124 Venice

Just as any tour of Venice must surely begin in Piazza San Marco, this one does too. Tucked away in a corner of the city’s theatrical main square is a magnificently dense display of Scarpa’s scenographic approach. It was commissioned in 1957 by Olivetti, then the most renowned manufacturer of high-design typewriters and early computers, as a spectacular showroom in the most intensely historic setting.

Located under a 16th century archway, the building is both subtle and surprising. When it’s closed, there’s not much to see, but it opens into a true modernist jewel box. The long, narrow space has attractive tiers that draw the eye along its entire length, while a stone staircase (surely one of the great mid-century examples) seems to float counterintuitively up to a mezzanine, extending into a series of surfaces that could be used as desks, shelves or displays.

The floor, now widely copied, is a mosaic of Murano glass squares set in terrazzo: a contemporary echo of the floors of St. Mark’s Basilica, which also reminds us that Scarpa began as a glass designer for the Murano manufacturer Venini . There are no simple surfaces here. There are gold panels embedded in the walls; Secret doors and display cases are hidden behind sliding stone sections. It is complex but quiet. Now open as a museum, it is the perfect introduction to the work of this absolutely unique architect. Website; Instructions

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2. Correr Museum (1957-60)

Piazza San Marco 52, 30124 Venice

Just a few steps away, on the upper floors of the Renaissance Procuratie Nuove (above Italy’s oldest café, Florian, which dates back to 1720), is the Museo Correr. Of course, the real reason to visit here is not Scarpa, but the museum’s collection of Renaissance art and decorative objects. But the architect’s exhibition systems and methods are also surprising.

Their approach may seem simple: remove works from walls and place them on easels and stands of your own design; making industrial-looking mounts for antique church sculptures; and insert modern, minimalist rooms of light and clarity into the venerable Renaissance interiors without damaging the original structure, but it was truly radical. Other innovative museum exhibitions, notably Lina Bo Bardi’s São Paulo Museum of Art (MASP), are unthinkable without Scarpa’s innovations in exhibition design.

It is also worth visiting the Academy Gallery Cross the Grand Canal at Dorsoduro to see more of Scarpa’s interventions. These date from a little earlier (1945 to 1959) and give an idea of ​​the evolution of his ideas about display and detail. (However, for big, fully realized ideas, you’ll have to travel to the Castelvecchio in Verona: an absolute tour de force of handling historical art and architecture through a meticulous contemporary lens.) Website; Instructions

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3. Querini Stampalia Foundation (1959-63)

Campo Santa María Formosa 5252, 30122 Venice

This is one of those buildings that you may have come across but never noticed. Located just a short walk northeast of Piazza San Marco, it is announced by a small, delicate steel and wood bridge with wonderful bronze handrails, all designed and engineered by Scarpa.

Inside there is a very fine art gallery (mainly old Venetian masters) and a beautiful library, which is open to the public, but most of Scarpa’s work is characterized in a courtyard that elucidates the architect’s incredible ability to reconcile forms modern with archaic architecture. It also addresses the city’s dependence (and fear) on water.

The space is designed as a sculpture garden and a landscape project laid out with water elements. They are always active but come to life during the Venice night. high water (seasonal high tides), which are not repelled by the building but welcomed: the institution rises above its level, while the garden becomes a flooded memory of Atlantis, absorbing the tide. Website; Instructions

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4. Gardens of the Biennale (1952-56)

Giazzo Street, 30122 Venice

Many visitors will be familiar with Scarpa’s interventions in the Giardini, even if they do not know that they are his. The site of the world’s premier art and architecture biennale is a remarkable landscape of condensed architectures: small pavilions struggling with the task of representing entire nations. Tying them together is a connective tissue of even smaller buildings with more mundane functions, which are often just as architecturally fine, if not better.

The small ticket office at the entrance to the Giardini, for example, is a rare example of a free-standing Scarpa structure (no longer used), whose leaf-shaped canopy crowns a glazed almond-shaped office contained in a molded concrete base . It is both robust and delicate.

The Sculpture Garden is another deceptively simple affair; In a green-walled courtyard, an excavated roof sits atop super-thick concrete columns, punctuated by the architect’s usual waterways: the presence of the lagoon is always brought inside. Scarpa seems to do very little but the effect is almost always powerful.

Finally, there is the pavilion he designed for Venezuela. Located between the then Soviet Union and Switzerland, this was Scarpa’s first independent building as a solo architect (as opposed to interventions in historic structures, which were his forte). Lit from above and beautifully detailed, the designer’s signature concrete steps are revealed on the walls and ceiling, as if peeling back layers of history. The building, clearly influenced by Josef Hoffmann’s austere Austrian pavilion, now looks a little old, but is still very pretty. Website; Instructions

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5. Tomb of Brión (1968-78)

San Vito di Altivole, near Treviso

This one is not on a walk. In fact, it’s practically in the middle of nowhere, in the town of San Vito di Altivole, northwest of Venice. But if you’re in the area or have the energy to drive an hour, this is without a doubt Scarpa’s masterpiece and a project in which he became so emotionally invested that he had himself buried alongside it.

The tomb was designed for Onorina Tomasin-Brion, the widow of Giuseppe Brion, founder of the venerated electronics company Brionvega, which, like Olivetti, used the best Italian industrial designers to create desirable, durable products that were almost as much art. as a product. What Scarpa created looks like some kind of lost city from the future. The series of covered hallways, rooms and chapels lies somewhere between a Georgian landscape of mythical follies and a place of occult worship.

Brion’s futuristic sarcophagus has science fiction lettering (very characteristic of later Scarpa) and a green and blue mosaic vault, echoing the watery colors of the lagoon. Everywhere, there are those stepped surfaces, as if slowly revealing an archeology of the future beneath, and circular openings. There is something of Italo Calvino here. invisible cities (published in 1972, while it was under construction), in which the narrator describes a series of impossible, absurd and metaphorical cities, each of which turns out to be a version of Venice. All the strangeness and beauty of the city are summed up here, surprisingly, in the most modern way. Website; Instructions

Photography by Cemal Emden for “Carlo Scarpa: The Complete Buildings” (Prestel)

Have you noticed any strikingly modernist architecture in Venice? Tell us in the comments below. AND follow FT Globetrotter on Instagram at @FTGlobetrotter