MID-TWENTIETH CENTURY Italy gave birth to some of the world’s most radically exuberant design and architecture. Defined by stark whiteness, cool steel and lustrous colored plastic, a big part of its charm was how cheerfully divorced it was from the country’s beloved ancient past. Gio Ponti altered the Milan skyline forever in 1958 with the streamlined Pirelli Tower, and furniture makers Cappellini and Kartell defined the Felliniesque cool of linea italiana.
And then there was Carlo Scarpa. While other Modernists jettisoned the past, his work from the postwar era to the late 1970s venerated and transformed it. His architecture was an antidote to the era’s brazen showiness: subtle and natural instead of flashy and proudly artificial. Although he built a handful of private homes and public buildings from the ground up, his reputation was made by his reimaginings of centuries-old museums — commissions others might have scorned as too constrained by the past — in the process of which he created a road map for both honoring history and transcending it. Enamored of Frank Lloyd Wright (Wright returned the adoration), his work took inspiration as well from Mondrian, Albers, Rothko and Josef Hoffmann. Well-traveled in Japan, he used a high-low fusion of organic elements, decades before such a mix was fashionable in the West — timber, concrete, rusted metals, travertine and glass. Obsessed with details, down to handmade screws and hinges, he could, Philip Johnson once observed, ‘‘make poetry out of the smallest rod or piece of stone.’’ (The architect Louis Kahn, a friend, wrote a poem about Scarpa, celebrating the power of his minute twists of the form, and noting, ‘‘The detail is the adoration of Nature.’’) Nearly 40 years after his death, the compact but powerful body of work he left behind, including minimalist furnishings and incomparable glassworks, remains as striking in its subversive simplicity as when he first made it.
If Scarpa is less well known today than his contemporaries, it’s perhaps because he did virtually all his work in and around Venice — the country’s most tradition-bound big city, as opposed to avant-garde Milan. But there is another reason: His oeuvre was built, in part, by burying his ego. By most accounts understated, meticulously gracious and profoundly well read (his large library was always open to his friends), he wasn’t one to worry about his legacy or the enduring purity of his creations. ‘‘He believed in the elegance of incompletion,’’ says Robert McCarter, author of a 2013 Scarpa monograph. ‘‘He wasn’t afraid of his work being added to in the future. He understood that everything was essentially dynamic.’’
FOR SCARPA, Venice was the cradle of civilization. He was born there in 1906 to a schoolteacher father, and spent his childhood in and around the city. After graduating from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts — he never bothered to sit for the architect’s licensing exam and was usually referred to with the honorific of ‘‘professore’’ instead of ‘‘architetto’’ — he spent 15 years of his career at the Venini glassworks in Murano, where he was design director. Throughout, he maintained a nearly religious belief that his Modernist sensibility could be braided together with the city’s Gothic past and its charming, slightly askew symmetry.
When he returned to architecture, his commissions were notable for their ability to maintain the structures’ original integrity. At the Castelvecchio Museum, in a 14th-century fortress in Verona — which had undergone a slew of restorations over the years — he transferred the art from the walls to easels and rugged steel vitrines. He also pulled the floor away from the walls, creating a channel that references the moats that once surrounded the castle. At the Fondazione Querini Stampalia, in a 16th-century palazzo, the garden’s multilevel copper basin of concrete and mosaic with labyrinths of alabaster and Istrian stone feels both stark and strangely ancient.
Always, his materials lend geometric punctuation, gracefully framing rooms, drawing the eye to original details as well as to his own massive, near-circular windows and doors, vaulted ceilings, gashes of natural light and vertiginous stairs. In the Olivetti showroom in Venice, the marble-slab central staircase seems to float; in the Museo Canova in Possagno, dedicated to the work of the neo-Classical sculptor, sunlight illuminates the plaster casts through boxlike corner-windows-cum-skylights.
He was, in fact, always beckoning brightness — often in short supply in Venice. His travels in Japan taught him the importance of harnessing water through arched bridges and constructing recessed floors that allowed the current to become part of the building — crucial for someone working in a city built on canals. Japan also inspired some of his favorite motifs: spareness and balance, the absence of the unnecessary, the imperfect grid of the shoji screen. Numerology intrigued him as well: The number 11 — the number of letters in his name, though he never gave a formal explanation — is buried everywhere in his buildings, as well as in his hundreds of strikingly beautiful, impressionistic architectural renderings. He was, he often said, ‘‘a Byzantine at heart, a European sailing towards the Orient.’’
The apotheosis of his work may be the Brion Cemetery near Treviso, which was commissioned as a private mausoleum and garden by the family that owned the electronics giant Brionvega, and on which he worked for nearly a decade. Everything at Brion is Scarpa writ large. There is the archetypal arched footbridge over the modest raised tombs of Giuseppe and Onorina Brion, which poignantly pierce formal geometry by leaning toward each other. There is the monumental concrete form that holds a vast tiled chapel with vaulted ceilings, and the soft light filtered through small, strategically placed windows, with whisper-thin marble instead of glass panes. There is also the huge cutout of interlocking circles offering a view to a meditation pavilion, a Venn diagram of, perhaps, the nature of the Brions’ love, or a symbol of eternity.
And, finally, there is Scarpa himself. He died on yet another trip to Japan, at age 72, at the height of his powers, after falling down a set of concrete stairs. In the hospital for 11 days before he died in the 11th month of the year, unable to talk and only able to write backwards, he created tiny illustrated books for friends, making beauty until nearly the last moment. He’s buried at Brion, standing up, as per his instructions, wrapped, like a medieval warrior, in simple white linen sheets.