George Dodds | University of Tennessee

Chapter 6: The Landscape Dimension in Scarpa’s Architectural Production

From A Transparent Mirror: Landscape and Garden in the Work of Carlo Scarpa

As we have seen, Scarpa’s conception of the Fondazione Querini-Stampalia, the

Museo di Castelvecchio, and the Banca Popolare, and many other projects, included
interior and exterior spaces that worked as part of a comprehensive program in which
landscape and garden elements comprised an important component. Yet, the signifi-
cance of the landscape dimension in Scarpa’s work goes far beyond the value of any
particular landscape or garden that he designed. It is one thing to discuss Scarpa’s
A Transparent Mirror discrete use of these elements as part of an architectural project; it is another thing
to suggest that he seems to have thought about architecture through the paradigm of
Landscape and Garden in the Work of Carlo Scarpa landscape. Traces of this paradigm are in his drawings and his buildings. Sometimes
the landscape paradigm informs the entire scope of a project; such is the case with
the Fondazione Querini-Stampalia,[1] the Olivetti Vacation Colony Competition, Brus-
son (Ivrea), (1956, Oc 113.), the Villa Ottolenghi in Bardolino (1974-78; Oc 205), and
the Villa Palazzetto, Monselice (Padua), (1969-78; Oc 203).[2] This is also the case
at the Museo di Castelvecchio, where Scarpa’s treatment of the floor seems to have a
dual significance. The floor’s morphology mimics both Wright’s use of multiple shallow
floor planes as a way of engaging the landscape and the geological formations Ruskin
sketched during his trips through the Alps. Similar drawings by Ruskin of rock forma-
tions from Verona were included in the exhibition and catalogue, Ruskin a Verona, copy
of which Scarpa owned (Mullaly 1966, Figure 28). Ruskin also analogized St. Mark’s
cathedral as a human-made mountain in The Stones of Venice.[3] The use of the
“moon gate” opening and the parete interrotta are other, somewhat more abstract signs
that Scarpa was thinking in terms of landscape even when he was designing buildings.
In the Italia ’61 exhibit Scarpa seems to have coded the parete interrotta, discussed in
Chapter 4, as a sign of landscape. He used this “interrupted wall” whenever he attempt-
ed to either invoke the idea of, or open a view to, a landscape or garden.[4] Scarpa
used a parete interrotta at the Palazzetto in Monselice, where the wall is used both to
support the stair he designed but never built, and for a window opening that he built for
an apartment he never completed [6.1 & 6.2].[5] I return to the Olivetti Vacation Colony
Competition and the Villa “Palazzetto” in Monselice later in this chapter.
6.1a
Before discussing further the landscape dimension of Scarpa’s architectural practice, it
is important to place this aspect of his thinking within a larger historical condition. The
Scarpa literature is replete with characterizations of his uniqueness and anecdotes
of his curious and at times bizarre personal habits and rituals. My intention is not to
diminish the genius of his work, but rather to demonstrate the tradition of which it was
part. Scarpa spoke of his work as being part of an architectural tradition, although he
assiduously avoided stating the traditions to which he was alluding. With colleagues
like Manfredo Tafuri and Francesco Dal Co, who can blame him for his reticence to
speak frankly about his intentions. Moreover, when one has scholars like Giuseppe
Mazzariol, Licisco Magagnato, Carlo Ragghianti, Pier Carlo Santini, Neri Pozza, and
Manlio Brusatin speaking in your behalf, why bother? I however, do not have this
luxury. Consequently, before going any further, it is necessary to put Scarpa’s architec-
George Dodds 6.1b

38

6.2a 6.2b
tural work, which at times was conceived of through the paradigm of “landscape,” into
a larger historical framework.
To explore the “landscape” dimension of Scarpa’s architectural works and the gen-
esis of this idea, it seems necessary to explain a few key terms before using them as
metaphors. Otherwise, one runs the risk of inadvertently rendering rich and multivalent
nomenclature into empty signs. This seems to be the unhappy case when Auguste
Choisy invoked the term “landscape in his Historie de l’architecture (1899).”[6] Using
over 1000 illustrations – many in a new format of axonometric view looking up from
below the structure – Choisy demonstrated how sound construction was the sole ba-
sis for meaning, invention, and harmony in architecture (Choisy 1899). He explained:
“Each architectural element taken separately is symmetrical, but each ensemble is
treated as a landscape in which there is only balance between masses (Choisy 1899,
419).”[7] When Choisy uses the expression “comme un paysage” he simply means the
“amalgamated effect;” not the paradigm of landscape.
“Landscape architecture” and “landscape” are equally “slippery” terms, the latter of
which John Stilgoe discusses at length in his Common Landscape of America, 1580
to 1845 (Stilgoe 1982). The term “landscape” has a much older history than does
“landscape architecture,” the former dating back to the Germanlandschaft and the
Dutch landskip, as the antithesis to “wilderness.” The term landscape was adopted by
the fine arts soon after its invention. John Claudius Loudon coined the term “landscape
architecture” in 1840.[8] In Italian, the term landscape is quite complex. Leaving aside
the various Italian terms for garden and grove, landscape in Italian is alternately known
by the terms, paese, campagna, and paesaggio. Campanga is typically a generic term
meaning agrarian countryside. Paesaggio, on the other hand, is more specific. It is
formed from the conjunction of paese and aggio. In the Grande Dizionario della Lingua
Italiana, paeseis defined as, “The extension of territory of immense dimensions, lived
and cultivated, and typified by peculiar and homogenous physical and anthropic char-
acteristics.” The principle meaning of “aggio” is, “The difference between the nominal
and real value of currency....”[9] This conjunction of paese and aggio demonstrates that
in Italian, the distance between the productive agrarian campanga and the meaning
of paesaggio remains small; both depend on the artifice of adding value through hu-
man occupation. Definitions of paesaggio often include a view of a small town, the
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George Dodds | University of Tennessee
implication of which is that landscape in Italy was almost always inhabited and produc-
tive. Hence, the Italian landscape is fundamentally related to food and wine production
and ultimately to feeding one’s stomach more than to feeding one’s longing for aesthetic
moments of vision.
The term landscape, in English and French, is less a product of capitalism, more di-
rectly connected to what Emilio Sereni, in Storia del paesaggio agrario italiano, calls
the “bel paesaggio” the subject of the paintings of the Venetian School and influenced
the development of the idea of landscape in Germany, France, Great Britain, and the
United States (Sereni 1961, 187-189).[10] Alternately, Sereni argues for instituting
(Leninist) reforms of the agrarian methods of production that would better situate his
preferred notion of the productive landscape in regards to the “mercato comune eu-
ropeo (Sereni 1961, 449).”[11] Hence, Sereni values the paintings of Giovanni Bellini
over that of later Venetian landscapists (Sereni, 1961, 194-197). This also helps to
explain why the profession of landscape architecture is only now becoming common-
place in such countries as Italy and Spain, which have only recently begun academic
professional programs. Moreover, the term “landscape” is only now becoming part of
the architectural vocabulary of contemporary architectural production in Italy (Cao, et.
al. 1998).
John Dixon Hunt explains that the “bifurcated” term and activity of landscape architec-
ture “draws its energies from the older, more established, and theoretically grounded
discipline of architecture and (given the derivation of the term landscape) from the fine
art of painting…(Hunt 2000, 217).” While landscape architecture, as a discipline and
as a profession, has depended largely on art and architectural historians for what little
theory exists to date, architectural speculation and production has been reciprocally
influenced by landscape and landscape architecture, particularly in terms of the idea
of the picturesque.[12] “During the picturesque debates at the end of the eighteenth
century,” Hunt comments, “Humphry Repton, somewhat ironically, adduced a whole
repertoire of painters on which various encounters with the real world could be modeled
(Hunt 2000 131).” Repton’s list includes Salvator Rosa, Claude, Poussin, and Watteau,
each for a different “function” in the instruction in daily living.[13] Hunt continues:
But long after the time when Repton’s gallery of artists could be counted on to in-
form landscape design, the term picturesque is still invoked to discuss landscape
effects. Its range of meaning is ample, not to say vague. Beyond implying some-
thing simply visual, however there always lurks within the usage a gesture to actual
pictures and picturing. (Hunt 2000, 131)[14]
Traces of this vision of the picturesque landscape are registered to varying degrees in
the writings, projects, and buildings of a wide range of architects spanning more than
two centuries. Peter Collins is the only mid-20th-century architectural historian to have
identified this phenomenon as a positive and fundamental contribution to the develop-
ment of Modern architecture. Collins was a Professor of Architecture at McGill Uni-
versity from 1956 until his suicide in 1981 (Collins 1965/1998). He devoted an entire
chapter of his Changing Ideals in Modern Architecture to, “The Influence of the Pictur-
esque.” I draw three principal ideas from Collins’s text which help explain and develop
my argument. In addition to the role of the Picturesque, later in this chapter I also make
use of his “Biological Analogy” and his “Gastronomical Analogy” -- all three of which
were parts of the landscape dimension of Carlo Scarpa’s architectural production.[15]
Collins was trying to accomplish for an English-reading architectural public what Bruno
Zevi had earlier attempted in Italy – to establish an alternative to the CIAM-Giedion
axis, the center pole of which was the work of Le Corbusier. Collins proposed, as an
alternative to Le Corbusier, the work of Auguste Perret, Mies van der Rohe, and Walter
Gropius.[16] Zevi, on the other hand, argued for the work of Frank Lloyd Wright, Alvar
Aalto, and anything vaguely resembling an “organic” point of view. While Giedion does
refer to “Architecture as an independent organism,” in the opening of Space, Time, and
Architecture, he is referring to an internally coherent work, based on notions of Baroque
space and form (Giedion 1956, 20). For Giedion, modern architecture springs from the
Baroque, vaulting over the Picturesque and much of he late 18th and the 19th centuries,
directly to the cubists. Collins and Zevi offered alternate positions that valued continuity

over contrast. Collins’s use of such terms as “landscape,” “picturesque,” “biological,” and
“mechanical” was in direct response to Geoffrey Scott’s, The Architecture of Human-
ism (Scott 1914). What were Scott’s “fallacies,” became Collins’s “analogies.” For Col-
lins, the Picturesque, or “thinking in pictures,” provided continuity, where Scott saw only
caprice. Scott argued that the Baroque was “always logical [and] neither unconsidered
nor inconsistent…[commonalties that characterized] the picturesque.”[17] Although
Giedion never refered to Scott or his work, Scott’s The Architecture of Humanism, may
have been the impetus that emboldened Giedion to directly connect Wöfflin’s ideas on
the Baroque architecture to the work of Picasso, Gropius, Bruno Taut, and Theo van
Doesburg, skipping the “pathetic fallacies” of the 18th and 19th centuries.
In his characteristically unfootnoted, Faulknerian, and matter-of-fact style Collins ex-
plains his understanding of the relation of the picturesque to architecture:
The effect of introducing buildings amongst artificially established rocks and cas-
cades as part of the landscape, was thus, as far as architecture was concerned,
merely a first step towards establishing the general idea that rural architecture
ought essentially to be thought of as making natural scenery more ‘picturesque,’
i.e. more like a landscape painting; for according to Joseph Addison, the works of
nature appear still more pleasing the more they resemble those of art, and accord-
ing to Archibald Alison, a scene is picturesque only if it is such as to awaken a train
of associations (comparable to the ostensibly mythological subjects of Poussin’s or
Claude’s pictures) additional to those which the scene itself is calculated to excite.
(Collins 1998, 50)
Through the model of the picturesque, Collins foregrounded the heretofore unspoken
issue of taste, character, and visualization, to the nature of modern architectural pro-
duction. Privileging the Picturesque within his history of modern architecture permitted
Collins to both open and close his history with the concept “parallax” as an alternative
to the Giedion space-time schema.[18] Collins concludes that by attempting to deny
the condition of parallax, architects such as Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, and even
Perret on occasion, had in fact negated the tradition that was inherent to the design and
experience of architecture throughout history. The architects Collins cites as having
successfully avoided this trap are, “Gropius, and particularly … Mies van der Rohe, the
greatest of all pioneers of modern parallax, whom Giedion, with regard to Space-Time,
completely neglects (Collins 1998, 292).”[19]
The following is a brief overview of some of the “pathetic fallacies” that Scott and
Giedion readily discounted – that help explain the historical context of architectural
discourse and production. I begin with Robert and James Adam in Great Britain, both
because their work is interconnected with many of the architects I will be discussing,
and because they provide the earliest explicit statement I have yet to find on the sub-
ject. I conclude this overview with Carlo Scarpa’s work in 20th-century Italy. [20]
In the “Preface” to the first of their 3-volume The Works in Architecture of Robert and
James Adam, Esquires (London 1773-1778), the Adam brothers provocatively imply
that there is a direct relation between architectural experience and the sensations pro-
duced by a Picturesque landscape.[21] The Adam brothers gave voice to the then
contemporary notion of the Picturesque.[22] Their monograph was written shortly af-
ter and clearly influenced by the Thomas Whately’s Observations on Modern Garden-
ing (1770) in which landscape and fabriques were considered as parts of a seamless
experience. Moreover, the Adam brothers also invoked a much older yet related belief
that the value of certain works of art can be judged by how well they capture and dem-
onstrate the sensation of movement.[23] The Adam brothers explain:
Movement is meant to express, the rise and fall, the advance and recess, with
other diversity of form, in the different parts of a building, so as to add greatly to the
picturesque of the composition. For the rising and falling, advancing and receding,
with the convexity and concavity, and the forms of the great parts, have the same
effect in architecture, that hill and dale, fore-ground and distance, swelling and
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George Dodds | University of Tennessee
sinking have in landscape: (sic) That is, they serve to produce an agreeable and
diversified contour, that groups and contrasts like a picture, and create a variety of
light and shade, which give great spirit, beauty and effect to the composition.[24]
Commenting on this passage in his The Picturesque: Studies in a point of View, Chris-
topher Hussey explains, “In this passage to Adam clearly states the relation that was
beginning to be recognized not only between pictorial composition and architecture,
but between a building and its surroundings (Hussey 1929, 191).” Adam was also a
painter of picturesque landscapes, often filled with ruined buildings, dead trees, and
other tropes that were common to the picturesque repertoire. To underscore this rela-
tion of the picturesque to architectural production, particularly to the work of Sir John
Soane, Hussey adds,
Not only are many of [Adam’s] designs given surroundings that breathe the senti-
ment of Gainsborough, but there are in the Soane Museum some forty semi-ar-
chitectural landscapes and compositions of buildings and scenery…besides many
rough sketches of picturesque glimpses made when he was in Italy. (Hussey 1929,
191)
Returning to the qualities of movement and sensation mentioned earlier, these too
were key to Boullée’s “theory” of architecture, written shortly following the publication of
Volume I of the Adam monograph and based largely on the question of architecture’s
relation to the idea of nature.[25] Echoing the sentiments of the Adam brothers, Boul-
lée argues in his Architecture, essai sur l’art, that the sensations that ground all archi-
tectural experience are those that are indistinguishable from our direct participation
with the natural world (natura naturata)[26]. It is not my intention, however, to equate
“nature” – let alone the complex idea of nature in the 18th century – to the term “land-
scape” as the Adam brothers used it.[27]
Charles Perrault, in Parallèlle des anciens et des moderns en ce qui regarde les arts et
les sciences (Paris, 1688-97), argued that there were at least three “natures:”
….pure nature, which may be seen outside the window and which is wild, common,
vulgar, sometimes even ugly; la belle nature, which is visible in art and which ought
to be a selective abstraction from pure nature; and beyond belle nature, making it
possible, the idea of nature, which not only guides the choice of the artist but even
allows him to improve on the best chose from pure nature. This third realm, that of
the idea of nature, may also be called that of le vrai…. (Saisselin 1970, 126).[28]
Boullée’s understanding of the term “nature” seems to have been heavily influenced
by both Charles Perrault and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778). Boullée’s use of
the term “nature” in Architecture, essai sur l’art, oscillated, depending on the context,
among Perrault’s three natures, and Rousseau’s idea of unspoiled nature upon which
culture was based and against which civilization was judged.[29] Boullée also was well
versed in the discourse of the primary landscape theorist in France in the late-18th cen-
tury. Among the most influential of these commentaries are the French translation of
Thomas Whately’s Observations, Claude-Henri Watelet’s Essai sur les jardins (1774),
and Jean-Marie Morel’s treatise, Théorie des jardins (1776) (Middleton 1992). Boullée
read Morel’s treatise.[30] Yet, the manner in which Boullée rhetorically situates the
subject of human experience in regards to nature in his essai may be more indebted to
Le Camus de Mézières’, Le génie de l’architecture; ou, L’analogie de cet art avec nos
sensations (1780), in which Morel is assiduously cited. This is evinced most clearly
when Boullée discusses such things as his observations on seasonal change (Middle-
ton 1992, 48).[31]
Boullée had a clear appreciation for gardens. Commenting on the design of Ceno-
taphs, Boullée recounts his epiphany of the principle of “the architecture of shadows,”
which occurred while walking in a moonlit garden.
I was in the country, on the edge of a wood in the moonlight. My shadow pro-
duced by the light caught my eye (it was certainly nothing new to me). Because

of my particular mood, the image seemed to me of an extreme melancholy. The
shadows of the trees etched on the ground made a most profound impression on
me. My imagination exaggerated the scene, and thus I had a glimpse of all that is
most somber in nature.[32] I was struck by the sensations I was experiencing and
immediately began to wonder how to apply this, especially to architecture. I tried
to find a composition made up of the effect of shadows. To achieve this, I imagined
the light (as I had observed it in nature) giving back to me all that my imagination
could think of. That was how I proceeded when I was seeking to discover this.
Boullée combined Perrault’s “three natures” and his reading of Morel and Le Camus
de Mézières with his own painterly approach to architecture to form a unified vision of
architecture and nature in his Architecture, essai sur l’art. Boullée’s association with
painting is key to this vision. It is underscored throughout his text, beginning with the
epigram “Ed io anche son Pittore.” Boullée reveals the clear bias of a painter in his
“partial definition of architecture.” Unlike Alberti, for whom perspectival drawing was
excluded from the architect’s lexicon, Boullée considered perspectival space, in both
buildings and drawings, a necessary condition for the apprehension of architecture, and
by extension, landscape. In opposition to the architectural treatises that preceded his,
Boullée argued that architecture was “the art of creating perspectives by the arrange-
ment of volumes.”[34]
For Boullée, architecture was nothing less than the production of poetic effects and
sensations through the techniques of the painter. Hence, the distinction between land-
scape [painting] and architectural [painting] would have been differences in degree
6.3
for Boullée, not kind. This is, perhaps, most clearly seen, not in the drawings for the
cenotaph for Newton, but in one of his few built works, the Hôtel Brunoy in Paris (1774).
The Hôtel Brunoy, highly praised by Boullée’s contemporaries, is represented on the
first plate of Kraft and Ransonette’s popular folio of engravings (Kraft and Ransonette
1801). The relation of landscape and architecture is clearly registered in the longitudi-
nal section cut through the dining room and the garden [6.3]. The anonymously pro-
duced drawing represents an unambiguous desire on the part of Boullée to establish a
direct relation between garden and building wherein the one was seen as a transforma-
tion of the other. In the aesthetic debates of 18th-century Europe, painting was consid-
ered a natural and hence positive beauty, while language (i.e., poetry) were arbitrary or
customary beauties.[35] Consequently, by associating architecture with painting, Boul-
lée was able to find yet another ground for architecture as a natural and hence positive
beauty. He believed that painting, poetry and architecture, ought to be as didactic as
they are entertaining – instructive for the soul as much as for the mind. Most likely re-
ferring to the story of Zeuxis – first recorded by Cicero and later retold by Alberti in De
Pictura – Boullée explains in the language of a painter,
6.4a
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George Dodds | University of Tennessee
But when we consider the scope of architecture, we perceive that it is not only the
art of creating perspectives through the arrangement of volumes but that it also
comprises a knowledge of how to combine all the scattered beauties of nature and
to make them effective.[36]
The project in which Boullée most successfully assembled “the scattered beauties of
nature” is in his project for a Cenotaph for Sir Isaac Newton. Speaking about the prob-
lem of assigning an appropriate character to funereal monuments, Boullée argues that
a Cenotaph’s walls ought to be constructed of a light absorbing material so as “to create
a black image of an architecture of shadows outlined by even darker shadows.” [37] He
continues, “This type of architecture based on shadows is my own artistic discovery. It
is a new road that I have opened and if I am not mistaken, Artists will not refrain from fol-
lowing it.”[38] In his project for a cenotaph for Newton, Boullée combines the principles
of perspective and optics [6.5 & 6.6].[39]
In his 13th Discourse Sir Joshua Reynolds explicated the relation of a picturesque senti- 6.5
ment grounded in painting to architectural production. Many of Reynolds’s lectures,
delivered annually from 1769 to 1790 at the Royal Academy ceremony for student priz-
es, were translated almost immediately into Italian, French, and German (Wark 1997,
xiii-xiv).[40] Hence, Reynolds’s ideas may have been a source for Boullée and were
most likely influential for Soane.[41] In particular, Reynolds’s blurring of the distinction
between painterly production and architectural production seems to have greatly influ-
enced Boullée and Soane both intellectually and in the works they produced. By the
method of the painter, I am referring both to the intellectual process by which a painter
thinks about painting and the effects they are trying to produce. In his 13th Discourse,
Reynolds argued:
It may be worth the attention of Artists, to consider what materials are in their
hands,…and whether this art has [the] power to address itself to the imagination…
generally employed by Architects.…Architecture certainly possess many princi-
ples in common with Poetry and Painting. Among those which may be reckoned as
the first, is, that of affecting (sic) the imagination by means of association of ideas.
…Hence it is that towers and battlements are so often selected by the Painter and
the Poet, to make a part of the composition of their Landskip; and it is from hence
in a great degree, that in the buildings of Vanbrugh, who was a Poet as well as an
Architect, there is a greater display of imagination…. (Reynolds XIII: 401-417).
Reynolds explained that part of the reason for the painterly and picturesque success
of Vanburgh’s architecture is its appeal to “Gothick Architecture” over that of ancient
Greece. Reynolds continues:
6.4b

I can pretend to no skill in the detail of Architecture. When I speak of Vanbrugh,
I mean to speak of him in the language of our art. To speak, then of Vanbrugh in
the language of a Painter, he had originality of invention, he understood light and
shadow, and had great skill in composition. To support his principal object, he pro-
duced his second and third groups of masses; he perfectly understood in his Art
what is most difficult in ours, the conduct of the back-ground; by which the design
and invention is set off to the greatest advantage. What the background is in
Painting, in Architecture is the real ground on which the building is erected; and no
Architect took greater care that he that his work should not appear crude and hard;
that is, it did not abruptly start out of the ground, without expectation or prepara-
tion. (Reynolds XIII: 456-68)
It is difficult for a late-20th-century mind to fully comprehend how provocative were
Reynolds ideas for his time. He acknowledged the unconventional nature of his ideas
in his lecture, recognizing the dual hazards of applying the principles of one art to an-
other while, at the same time, privileging Gothic models over those of Greek antiquity.
Reynolds argued that the benefit of such a sensibility permits architects to take full
advantage of the “accidents” that occur in the course of their work and “to follow when
they lead and to improve them, rather than always to trust to a regular plan (Reynolds
XIII: 440).”
The built works, writings, and drawings of Sir John Soane and his associate J. M. Gan-
dy gave voice to Boullée’s “architecture of shadows” and Reynolds’s melding of pictur-
esque landscape and architectural production. Sir John Summerson calls the period
during which Soane delivered his lectures at the Royal Academy and built No. 13 Lin-
coln’s Inn Fields (the Soane Museum) and the Bank of London the “Picturesque Period”
(1806-21). Summerson explains, “Gothic and Pompeian elements are absorbed into
the style and the aesthetic theories of Payne Knight and Uvedale Price were probably
influential (Summerson 1983, 10).”[42]
The relation between Soane and Piranesi is a commonplace of the literature on both
architects. Middleton comments that perhaps Piranesi’s influence is most keenly reg-
istered in “Soane’s spatial vision….”[43] Soane met Piranesi when he was a student of
architecture in Rome. Piranesi gave Soane a present of four engravings that were the
start of Soane’s substantial collection of Piranesi’s work. Middleton posits that, while
Soane owned a great many of Piranesi’s works, it is probably the Carceri that had the
strongest effect on Soane – particularly in regards to the idea of the ruin.[44] In his
privately printed pamphlet, Crude hints towards an history of my house in L. I. Fields,
Soane comments on a yet-to-be-completed stairwell: “this very space, if a staircase,
would only have been one of those Carcerian dark staircases represented in some of
Piranesi’s ingenious dreams for prisons.”[45] Middleton comments that, “Soane fanci-
fully imagined the house as a ruin, in the process of discovery.”[46] Soane, in his his-
tory of the-not-yet-finished house commented: “some have thought it to have been a
heathen temple or a convent of nuns, while ‘others have supposed it to have been the
residence of some magician.’”[47]
Ruins fascinated Soane, as they were a common trope of the Picturesque, invoking
what were then considered positive associations with the sublime, melancholy, decay,
death, the distant past and the larger question of temporality. Hence, there was a
natural association between artificial ruins and viewing them in moonlight.[48] Soane
built a full-scale ruin at his country home Pitzhanger Manor in Ealing and wrote an ac-
companying “history” of the ruin for its visitors.[49] It is possible to apprehend, in the
physical reality of a ruin, the process by which nature takes back what was originally
hers.[50] In both Gandy’s drawings of the interior of No. 13 Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and
upon directly experiencing the place, there is a sense that Soane attempted to strike a
balance between the inherent instability of a ruin and the process of construction. The
result is a picturesque interior that oscillates between building and landscape. Soane
used the combined effects of the interior’s multi-layered walls, deep recesses, natural
light, and the construction of multiple prospects across seemingly vast and indefinite
spaces filled with sculpture and building fragments to achieve this quality that is neither
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George Dodds | University of Tennessee
wholly architecture nor landscape. The formal and visual effect that Soane desired
was not fragmentation as has been suggested elsewhere.[51] In his Academy lectures
Soane underscored his abhorrence of arbitrary and fragmented forms – severely criti-
cizing Piranesi whom “mistook Confusion for Intricacy, undefined lines and forms for
Classical Variety.”[52]
The writings, drawings, paintings, and built works of Boullée, Reynolds, and Soane
demonstrate how mixing the ground of painting and the ground of architecture became
a motivating factor in architectural production during the late-18th and early-19th centu-
ries. Peter Collins argues that this is particularly so in regards to the issues of sym-
metry, movement, and implicitly, parallax.[53] Collins observes that much of the archi-
tecture that is informed by this “romantic,” “picturesque,” “landscape genesis” schema
is most vigorously realized in domestic projects due largely to “their modest dimen-
sions and their unrestricted sites (Collins 1998, 42).” In early-19th century Prussia,
Karl Friedrich Schinkel (1781-1841) transplanted this same schema from Italy, as did
Soane. For Soane, the primary influences tended to be the ruins of Roman antiquity he
encountered, both in situ and in the engravings of Piranesi. Schinkel was much more
impressed; however, by the simple rural dwellings he encountered in Italy, recorded in
many sketches from his visits. Many of these humble domiciles seem to merge with
their natural surroundings through their terraces, gardens, pergolas, balconies, and
ample adjacent landscapes.[54] It his mature work Schinkel combined landscape and
building into a complete and relatively uninterrupted experience. Barry Bergdoll ex-
plains that to commemorate his marriage to Princess von Liegnitz:
King Friedrich Wilhelm III commissioned a new pavilion for the palace grounds…[the]
explicit aim [of which] was to obtain a modest private dwelling…in more immediate con-
tact with nature. The result was the purposeful recreation of a Neapolitan villa (1824-
25). Bergdoll continues:
The king’s enthusiasm for [the exterior enfilade] of the Neapolitan villa matched
Schinkel’s own fascination with the vernacular houses of the Italian countryside,
particularly those he had sketched on Sicily and Capri in 1803-04. Their exte-
rior stairs, habitable roofs, and covered trellises all served to blur the distinction
between life within their clean crisp stucco geometries and the luxuriant Italian
outdoors. (Bergdoll 1994, 108)
Among the devices that Schinkel often used to connect inside and outside was the
exedral bench to relate “his architectural designs to the larger order of the landscape
(Bergdoll 1994, 114).” In his later project, Lusthaus, or pleasure pavilion, near Post-
dam, Bergdoll explains that Schinkel did not take his cues from the English Picturesque
of Repton or Nash in which architecture was largely subservient to the agenda of the
larger landscape. “[R]ather, [geometrically structured architecture] established a frame
for a heightened understanding of the landscape.”[55] In another project designed at
the same time as the Lusthaus but realized in building was the casino for Prince Karl
at Schloß Glienicke Park (1824-25). Here Schinkel created a relation of landscape and
building wherein “A walk in the garden would literally take one through extensions of
[his] building, just as for those arriving by boat the casino served as a propylaeum to
the estate (Bergdoll 1994, 125).”
2. The Biological Analogy and Organic Architecture
Other 19th-century examples of the merging of architectural production and the norma-
tive bounds of a landscape production are Viollet-le-Duc’s proposal for the reconstruc-
tion of the Alps.[56] It may be possible to discount Viollet-le-Duc’s proposal for the Alps
as the extreme extension of what Peter Collins calls the “biological analogy” of that
period – which Viollet-le-Duc and Ruskin shared. Viollet, in his proposal, combined
his passion of renovating with his fondness of organically based [read Gothic] struc-
tures.[57] Collins organized the physical and conceptual center of Changing Ideals,
under the subheading, “Functionalism.” Collins described four basic “analogies.” They
are, in order of appearance, “Biological,” Mechanical,” Gastronomical,” and “Linguis-
tic.”[58] Collins explains:

According to Geoffrey Scott, the great ham done by the biological analogy was
that it substituted the criteria of evolution for the criteria of aesthetic judgement,
whereby architectural historians were no longer concerned with whether a building
was good or bad, by simply how it was to be classified. (Collins 1998, 157)
Collins’s “Biological Analogy” helps to demonstrate how “Organic Architecture,” as con-
ceived by Frank Lloyd Wright in the United States and Bruno Zevi in post-Second World
War Italy, is a highly particularized yet ultimately muddled manifestation of the more
fundamental notion of the “landscape genesis” of architecture. The term “organic” is
used broadly in architectural discourse. Perhaps because of its vagueness, or be-
cause of the naïveté and literalness that invariably accompanied its implementation,
Collins, like the architect Richard Neutra, seemed to favor the analogy of the “biological”
over that of the “organic.”[59] Zevi, nonetheless, included Neutra’s work in his Storia
dell’architettura moderna (1950), as an example of “Organic Architecture” in the United
States. Yet, Neutra was more comfortable with biological, psycho-physiological, and
ultimately more “scientific” approaches to architecture.[60]
Neutra’s work became more widely known in Italy after 1948 when the architect Gio
Ponti reestablished his position as editor of Domus, a journal that he founded and
edited from 1928 to 1941.[61] Hence, Neutra’s work would have been accessible to
Scarpa just at the critical moment when he was beginning to think about and design
landscapes and gardens. By 1960, Neutra’s Miramar Chapel appeared in the same is-
sue of Domus, as did Scarpa’s Olivetti Showroom.[62] The following year Ester McCoy
published an article on Neutra in Zodiac 8 (McCoy 1961). Ponti immediately began
publishing Neutra (and similar works) as a way of exposing the Italian architectural
community more provocative and polemical projects and buildings emblematic of the
International Style. One of the first works Ponti published was Neutra’s Kaufmann
House in Colorado.[63] Among the images included in the article is the now famous
photograph of the house at night, illuminated from within. In the background are the
foothills of the Rocky Mountains. In the foreground, silhouetted by an illuminated
outdoor pool, is the dark figure of a reclining female nude. The following year Ponti
published Neutra’s Venice lecture, discussed in Chapter 3. Neutra’s itinerary included
Milan, Florence, Rome, Naples, and Venice. In his lecture, he distanced himself from
what he considered the naïve conception of “organic” architecture that he witnessed in
Italy and the United States.[64]
Four years later, in the first book of his architectural work published in the United
States, Mystery and Realities of the Site, Neutra invoked the idea of the genius of the
place,[65] He began his pragmatic polemic much like a fable. This fable is directed not
to architects, but to potential clients.
Once upon a time the natural landscape had a face as familiar to man as that of his
mate. …[B]efore destruction by civilization, Nature, its objects, its constellations
of stars or landscape, it’s natural sites were regarded as animated. They too had
a physiognomy which conveyed a recognizable and expressive message. …A tree
or a spring housed a nymph, and a certain individuality characterized valley, or isle
off shore, was the homestead of a god or the playground of the devil. …What are
we to think of those picturesque natives an their worship of natural fact and geog-
raphy? …It is a dream finally ravished by a shrill alarm clock that signals the dawn
6.6a of the day opening – the opening of the subdivision. (Neutra 1951, 9-13)
Neutra continues:
My experience, everything within me, is against an abstract approach to land and
nature, and for the profound assets rooted in each site and buried in it like a trea-
surable (sic) wonder. The ancients thought those vital assets spirits. By listening
intently, you can hear them miraculously breath in their slumber. (Neutra 1951, 14)
Neutra was not interested in evoking the mysterious past, however; rather, awakened
by the “shrill alarm clock” of the reality of the site, he was searching for a more “biologi-
6.6b
48
George Dodds | University of Tennessee
cally” oriented way rather than an “organic” or “mysterious” one. Neutra sought a path
that was synchronous with the nature of the human body rather than the anthropo-
morphized face of mythic nature.[66] Neutra concludes The Mystery and Realities of
the Site with the “Admonition” to future clients that they should “try to understand the
character and peculiarities of [their] site. Heighten and intensify what it may offer, never
work against its inner grain and fiber.” Otherwise, he warns, the client will “pay dearly
for any such offence…(Neutra 1951 62).”
After leaving Erich Mendelshon’s office in Berlin Neutra worked with Wright at Taliesen
from November 1924 to February 1925 (Levine 1996, 195). He worked on several
of Wright’s textile-block houses that he later published in his book Wie Baut Ameri-
ka? (Neutra 1927, 73-75). The works of Neutra and Wright have often been considered
part of the same philosophy of architectural production, perhaps because of Neutra’s
early apprenticeship with Wright and due to the writings of polemicists such as Bruno
Zevi. Although these architects share certain superficial formal similarities, they ulti-
mately occupy very different political and philosophical camps, especially in relation to
the “landscape genesis” of architectural production.
As if to underscore this, in The Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright, Neil Levine con-
cludes his chapter on Wright’s Fallingwater House in Bear Run Pennsylvania with fa-
miliar architectural images. They are: the famous “day” and “night” sections through
Boullée’s Cenotaph for Newton; Claude-Nicholas Ledoux’s, House of Surveyors of
Loue River from his project for the Salt Works at Chaux; and William Chamber’s “Ru-
ined Arch” at Kew Gardens. Levine uses these images to bolster his argument that,
like these earlier architectural icons, the Kaufmann House is Wright’s quintessential
expression of the “natural house,” not because it looks “natural,” but because of its rela-
tion to temporality. For Levine, the ability to invoke and evoke the idea and experience
of time’s passing is the most ineffable quality of an Organic Architecture. Distancing
Fallingwater from the work of Neutra oThe sensation [created by its jutting cantilevers]
is one of substance rather than abstract shape, of something physical and almost pal-
pable rather than ideal and “non-objective.” In this regard, it should also be noted how
distinctly Wright treats materials and how differently he conceived of structure. In con-
trast to the abstract, diagrammatic grid of Le Corbusier’s Dom-ino system or Neutra’s
parallel solutions for steel framing, the structural system Wright adopted for Falling-
water made reference to natural forms and was intended to have a representational
effect. (Levine 1996, 239)[67]
Neither Wright nor Zevi was very precise about their definitions of “organic architec-
6.6c 6.6d

ture.” While both had a difficult time defining Organic Architecture, they knew it when
they saw it.[68] In a book Scarpa owned, The Future of Architecture (1953), Wright
attempted to define this ineffable thing called “organic architecture.” Wright opposed
“organic architecture” to “classic” architecture.[69] He explained that what Lao-tse had
recognized 2,500 years earlier was obviously not limited to “modern” or “organic” archi-
tecture, since its origin antedates these events. Yet, both precepts shared fundamental
ideals. [70]
Bruno Zevi is no less clear. Zevi studied architecture with Walter Gropius at Harvard
and lived in London during much of World War II. During the winter of 1943-44, Zevi
worked alongside Gordon Bunshaft, a future partner at Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill,
designed military camps for the Allied forces. Zevi watched in amazement as Bunshaft,
during his free time, designed abstract plans of houses that were pure Miesian prisms,
disconnected from any given site. Zevi chastised Bunshaft, exclaiming, ”You are mak-
ing static everything that is dynamic in Wright’s work. …Here we are in this dreary,
awful job of planning military camps, because we are fighting Fascism, and your sketch
is for a house that isn’t democratic in principle (Dean 1983, 19).”
It was during this time that Zevi was making daily anti-fascist radio broadcasts Giustizia
e Libertà, into Italy. Much to his chagrin, he was forced to cease his broadcasts be-
cause, according to General Eisenhower, “they are dangerous to Allied policy.”[71] It
was clear to Zevi that the Allied forces had decided to align with the Italian Monar-
chy and the existing “Badoglio semi-Fascist government.”[72] Lacking either a politi-
cal or architectural outlet, while still in London, Zevi produced his first book in which
he combined his political agenda into the architectural polemic. Verso un’architettura
organica (1945), was published in translation by Faber and Faber in 1950. In 1944
Zevi returned to Italy. The following year he founded l’Associazione per l’Architettura
Organica (APAO). In the second issue of Metron, the APAO’s unofficial journal, Zevi
outlined the APAO’s constitution. In Article 2, Zevi proposed:
Organic architecture means architecture for man, modeled according to the hu-
man scale, according to the spiritual, psychological, and material necessities as-
sociated with man. Organic architecture is thus the antithesis of the monumental
architecture that serves myths of state. It opposes the major and minor axes of
contemporary neoclassicism—the vulgar neoclassicism of arches and column,
and the false neoclassicism that is born from the pseudomodern forms of contem-
porary monumental architecture.[73]
It is easy to see in retrospect why Zevi considered Scarpa’s design for the Brion sanc-
tuary, particularly the Chapel, as anathema to him. Its formal autonomy and its monu-
mental scale seemed the repudiation of everything that Wright and Organic Architec-
ture represented.[74] While Zevi saw Wright’s buildings and urban planning principles
as concrete realizations of democratic and anti-Fascist ideals, Scarpa viewed Wright’s
work as a repository of formal and conceptual possibilities. Scarpa admitted that at first
(meaning in the 1940s and 1950s):
Wright’s work was like a bolt of lightening for me. I had never had an experience
like this before. It swept me away like a stormy sea – you can see this in some of
my first house projects. I was too impressed by Wright’s work. Now I no longer
like any of those early houses because I do not think one should imitate so shame-
lessly. (Dominguez 1984, 297)
During the period in which Scarpa was swept away by Wright’s work, he and Zevi
became involved in the imbroglio regarding Wright’s project for the Masieri Memoriael
in Venice. Wright’s design became the focus of the first major debate about “modern”
architecture in Italy. Zevi, in part through his magazine Metron, was one Wright’s most
vocal advocates. Wright considered his project “contextual,” explaining that he “wanted,
by way of modern techniques, to make the old Venice Tradition live anew.” Yet, the proj-
ect provoked a strong polarizing reaction in Italy and elsewhere (Levine 1996, 380).
Levine neatly summarizes a lengthy, confusing, and complex debate.[75]
50
George Dodds | University of Tennessee
Defenders of the Wright project were generally of three sorts. Ardent “organicists” of
the Zevi-led APAO felt that nothing could be more important for Venice than to have an
example of Wright’s work in its midst. Others, like Michelucci, distanced themselves
from Wright on ideological grounds, yet believed this particular project had great con-
textual merit. Still others, perhaps the large majority of modernists, defended Wright’s
building mainly on the basis of freedom of expression. (Levine 1996, 382)
One important part of the politics of this debate missing from Levine’s account involves
Zevi’s publication of a translation of Wright’s “Organic Architecture Looks at Modern
Architecture,” in Metron 48 (Wright 1953, 6-10). To soften the impact of the article,
Zevi published it without the illustrations from the original English-language version
published in Architectural Record (Wright 1952, 148-156).[76] The most provocative
image in the American publication was of Wright’s as-yet-unbuilt and equally controver-
sial project for The Solomon R. Guggenheim Memoriael Museum for New York City. In
contrast, the only image accompanying Zevi’s translation was a staged photograph of
a very gentle and benevolent-looking Wright, cane-in-hand, propped against the fender
of his automobile, looking out at the Arizona landscape. All of Zevi’s public relations
efforts were, in the end, no match of the political and economic strength of the opposi-
tion. A group that included Bernard Berenson, Ernest Hemingway, the English architec-
tural critic J. M. Richards, and a number of wealthy foreigners who had helped restore
Venice’s monuments all united against the project. After two public meetings and one
design revision by Wright, the project was finally defeated in November 1955 (Levine
1996, 382). Afterwards, many local architects attempted to realize a project on the site,
including an associate and former student of Scarpa’s, Valeriano Pastor. Ultimately
Scarpa was commissioned and succeeded in building the Fondazione Masieri. The key
to Scarpa’s success in this matter hinged on a Canaletto painting in which the building
that the Masieri’s owned was depicted with a symmetrical façade composed of two
and not one chimney as it then stood. The Venetian authorities agreed with Scarpa’s
proposal to replace the existing and severely eroded façade with a new steel frame and
brick structure with an additional chimney, mimicking the building in Canaletto’s painting
(Los 1995: 98). The irony of this was surely not lost on Scarpa as their decision con-
firmed his low opinion of the Venetian historical commission. Yet, this painterly proposal
permitted Scarpa to create a wholly new interior composed of concrete cantilevered
concrete slabs and a Corbusian free plan.[77]
Despite Zevi’s passion and the Masieri project, Organic Architecture never gained a
foothold in Italy except for a few isolated cases. Manfredo Tafuri summarizes:
Works like the Villagio del Fanciullo in Trieste-Opicina designed by Marcello D’Olivo
in 1949 – one of the most remarkable projects of those years – or Samonà’s 1950
villa at Mondello remain, along with Edoardo Gellner’s works, Scarpa genial re-
readings of Wright, and a few mannerist exploits, isolated cases. The debate on
organic architecture remained on a verbal level. (Tafuri 1989, 21)
While Scarpa’s oeuvre must be understood to some degree in relation to Wright’s,
happily Scarpa’s landscape and architectural production is not limited to “genial re-
readings of Wright.” Many of Scarpa’s projects, particularly those produced during the
last decade of his life, are more influenced by Le Corbusier than by Wright.[78] Later
in Scarpa’s career, when he did turn to Wright, he often substantially transformed the
Wrightian model into something wholly new.
A curious example of this returns us to Scarpa’s Brion sanctuary and Wright’s Broad-
acre City project further illuminating the difference between Zevi’s and Scarpa’s ap-
preciation of Wright.[79] A year before the Brions commissioned Scarpa to design the
Brion sanctuary he traveled to North America, where he supervised the installation of
his exhibition for the Italian Pavilion at the 1967 Montreal Expo. While in North America
Scarpa visited Louis Kahn in Philadelphia and toured Wright’s work in Chicago and
Taliesin in Hillside Wisconsin. Although the drawing of Broadacre City was at Taliesin
West in 1967, Margo Stipe, a curator at the Frank Lloyd Wright Archives in Scottsdale
Arizona attests that “The Broadacre City model has always been at Taliesin and on
view. It is, therefore, likely [that] Scarpa would have seen it [during his visit].”[80] This
6.7
 George Dodds | University of Tennessee

was not the first time Scarpa saw the model, as it was part of the “Sixty Years of Living
Architecture” exhibition that was mounted in the Palazzo Strozzi in 1951 (Levine 1996,
374).[81]

Scarpa knew the project from his first edition copy of The Living City.[82] [6.7] The
Horizon Press edition of The Living City that he owned includes a large foldout plan
of Wright’s “Broadacre City 1934-1958,” along with Wright’s vague description of the
project. For Wright, Broadacre City represented the fullest possible realization of the
“natural house” in a natural city (Wright 1958, 112). Wright subtitled a section of The
Living City, “Architecture and Acreage Together Are Landscape.”[83] It is important to
note that Wright changed the wording of this heading from its original version in The
Disappearing City, “Architecture and Acreage Seen as Landscape.”[84] In the interven-
ing 25 years, Wright’s attitude towards the relation of landscape and architecture seems
6.8a
to have become more strident. Wright now offered, not a view, but an equation: Land-
scape = Architecture + Acreage, seemingly suggesting that architecture was a sub-
set of landscape. Wright’s notion of landscape, however, was not the bel paesaggio of
the Venetian School but something much more closely approximating the paesaggio
agrario italiano of Sereni, yet with no clearly defined limits. In attempting to meld land-
scape and architecture into a singular image of a city, the limits of which were inherently
unknown, Wright created a utopian vision that is relatively absent from the literature of
utopia until the 20th century.[85]

During his visit at Taliesen, the Taliesen Fellowship Scarpa was entertained in the
main living room, surrounded by the young men in closely cropped hair, suit coats,
and bow ties. Scarpa recounted that the Fellowship gave him Wright’s bed to use that
night but he was unable to sleep. Little wonder as the ergonometric aspects of the bed
6.8b were probably well beyond the range of Scarpa’s ample body. While he tossed and
turned that evening, among his thoughts may have been the model of Broadacre City
that he probably saw that day, after a 16-year hiatus. Perhaps to help him sleep he may
have read from the first Italian translation of The Living City, La città vivente, published
the year of his trip, carefully studying Wright’s plan.[86] Wright’s notion of landscape
and cities would have both intrigued and repelled Scarpa, whose idea of urbanism (a
topic on which he rarely expressed opinions of any sort) was largely influenced by his
experiences in cities like in Vicenza, Venice, Verona, Vienna, and Florence – all ex-
plicitly limited by walls of one kind or another. Scarpa’s interest in Broadacre City was
probably more visual than theoretical – more pictorial than urbanistic. Scarpa saw in
the model and the drawing published in The Living City, a kind of catalogue of shapes
and ideas – a virtual matrix of Wright’s ideas from which Scarpa borrowed with impu-
nity.[87] [6.8e & 6.10] One such detail bears an uncanny correspondence to Scarpa’s
project for the Brion sanctuary. Located in the lower third of Wright’s plan, aligned with
the major north-south spines of the city, is an L-shaped figure. It is an equal-legged “L,”
the center (or vertex) of which is a square. Inscribed into the square is the same Greek
cross motif that Scarpa used throughout the Brion sanctuary. [6.9] [88] The figures that
Scarpa used to form his cross were four mandorlas inscribed in a square.

In the Natural House, Wright expanded on Alberti’s notion of the city as the house writ
large:

…[I]t is in the nature of an organic building to grow from its site, come out of the
ground into the light – the ground itself held always as a component basic part of
the building itself. And then we have primarily the new ideal of building as organ-
ic. A building dignified as a tree in the midst of nature. (Wright 1954, 50)

Comparing Wright’s plan for Broadacre City with Le Corbusier’s Radiant City, William
Alexander McClung comments, “Wright conceived of [the natural house and by exten-
sion Broadacre City] as metaphysically unified like a body and not as a synthesis of
distinguishable components…(McClung 1983, 132-33).” By attempting to obfuscate
the distinction between the limits of building and landscape wherein the building and
the city loose their objectness – Wright succeeded in creating the image of a city that
would have obliterated the natural terrain and any hope of a paesaggio, bel paesag-
gio or otherwise. David Leatherbarrow has argued that, “Wright’s notion of completing 6.10

6.9

52

the landscape with a building is equivalent to the contextualist notion of infill because
both envisage building and circumstance in continuity, making architecture stylized
land fill (Leatherbarrow 1993, 21.” It is important to distinguish this “pathetic fallacy,”
as Leatherbarrow calls it, wherein the newly built is indistinguishable from the previ-
ously existing, from the work of Scarpa (Leatherbarrow 1993, 21). For Scarpa, the
“landscape genesis” of architecture did not rest upon the simplistic assertion that site,
and that which is added to a site, should become interchangeable. Rather, the distinc-
tion between new and old, landscape and building was fundamental for Scarpa. Be-
cause Scarpa designed buildings through the idea of landscape does not mean that he
thought a building should be indistinguishable from the site upon which it is built. While
Scarpa often purposefully blurred the distinction between landscape and building, he
never eradicated the distinction between the two.
The “landscape genesis” of architecture was, for Scarpa, something that was proprio
veneziano. As such, it was no less a fundamental part of his architectural production
as were the finely crafted details in which precious and base materials are combined to
construct an ambientale that is quintessentially Venetian and universal. Wright under-
scored the alchemical nature of these presentiments by prefacing The Living City with
a long citation from Paracelsus. The following is an excerpt from the final portion of that
preface:
All things are vehicles of virtues, everything in nature is a house wherein dwell certain
powers and virtues such as God has infused throughout Nature and which inhabit all
things in the same sense as the soul is in man. …True faith is spiritual consciousness,
but a belief based upon mere opinions and creeds is the product of ignorance, and is
superstition. …This physical body, which is believed to be of so little importance by
those who love to dream about the mysteries of the spirit, is the most secret and valu-
able thing. It is the true “stone which the builders rejected,” but which must become
the corner-stone of the temple. It is the ‘stone’ which is considered worthless by those
who seek for a God above the clouds and reject Him when He enters their house. This
physical body is not merely an instrument for divine power, but it is also the soil from
which that which is immortal in man receives its strength. (Wright 1958)
To avoid the “pathetic fallacy” wherein site and architecture are no longer distinguish-
6.11
54
George Dodds | University of Tennessee
able yet are fundamentally connected requires one to recognize that which is com-
mon to each while maintaining each as a discrete physical body and a body of knowl-
edge. Wright, in his buildings and urban plans, had a tendency to treat landscape as
an extension of architecture. Scarpa inverted this relation, wherein he often conceived
of architecture as a degree of landscape. The two were different for Scarpa – but their
difference was one of degree, not kind.
Perhaps one of the most striking images that demonstrates how Scarpa, at times, distin-
guished between landscape and building as a matter of degree and not kind, is his proj-
ect for the Olivetti Vacation Colony Competition, Brusson (1956, Oc 113) [6.11]. The
Olivetti Company sponsored the project. Adriano Olivetti was one of the most strident
and resourceful forces for social change and the cause of Modern architecture in Italy
both before and after the Second World War.[89] The Vacation Colony, planned for a
site in the mountains of Brusson in Val d’Ayas, was one in a series of Olivetti-sponsored
architectural projects. These projects signified a much larger social and aesthetic pro-
gram, the former of which was largely influenced by the writings of Lewis Mumford and
the development of “Greenbelt Cites” in the United States (Tafuri 1989, 23). In 1937
Olivetti commissioned the firm of BBPR to design a comprehensive regional plan for
the Val d’Aosta, in Northern Italy (Gregotti, 1968, 30-31). Vittorio Gregotti and Man-
fredo Tafuri help explain the degree of Adriano Olivetti’s influence on the intellectual and
cultural life of post-war Italy:
In 1949, the magazine Urbanistica resumed publication…and at the same time Co-
munità was founded, a magazine which was to greatly influence Italian urban stud-
ies, in the Mumfordian sense of community. The sponsor of both magazines [was]
Adriano Olivetti….(Gregotti 1968, 40-41)
Tafuri continues:
Comunità became concrete by privileging urban planning, with references…to ur-
ban sociology and to Anglo-Saxon models…. [Olivetti’s] ideas were guided by a
conception of commerce as the center from which radiates a neohumanistic ratio-
nalization of the physical environment. (Tafuri 1989, 23)
The Competition for the Vacation Colony was an extension of these ideals. It was
originally held in 1955 but did not yield a suitable project. A second competition was
initiated and opened to a wider group of architects that included Scarpa in collaboration
with Gilda D’Agaro. The program included housing for up to 150 children with various
facilities for study and recreation. Lia Camerlengo, summarizes:
Most of the designs submitted dealt with the subject analytically: separate functions
were studied separately and then juxtaposed in the building. …Reversing this meth-
odology, Scarpa and D’Agaro derived an architecture deductively, from the existing
landscape. They designed an articulated complex that stretched out along the slope
of the ground, rising to the summit…of the site. A series of cells in a fan-shaped
pattern…and varying in size for different functions is clustered together according to
organic rather than geometric principles. This is the result of Scarpa’s organic struc-
tures set in a landscape. (Dal Co and The jury, although enthusiastic about the Scarpa
and D’Agaro scheme, chose the proposal by Claudio Conte and Leonardo Fiori in-
stead, owing to the programmatic limitations of Scarpa’s project (Dal Co and Mazzariol
1984, 118). The built project was awarded a regional IN/ARCH prize in 1964, the same
year that Scarpa’s renovation and reorganization of the Museo di Castelvecchio was
awarded an IN/ARCH prize for the Veneto (Zevi 1966a, 42-46; 1966b, 62-63)
Scarpa’s initial sketches for the project are some of the most provocative architectural
drawings he had made to date. In them he represented one of his most literal at-
tempts to realize an “organic architecture” while at the same time accommodate the
a specific program and a real site. Lia Camerlengo has compared the Scarpa and
D’Agaro project to Wright’s Taliesin West and Ocatillo Camp (Dal Co and Mazzariol
1984, 118) [4.7]. Yet, it is far more daring and extreme than anything Wright had yet to
propose vis-à-vis the relation of landscape to building. Indeed, if Scarpa is indebted
6.12
 George Dodds | University of Tennessee

to any particular architect for the planning principles of the Olivetti Camp, it is probably The apartment at the Businaro estate represented more than simple seclusion for Scar-
Alvar Aalto rather than Wright – particularly Aalto’s Villa Mairea, in which the ambiguity pa. [6.13] Moreover, the landscape he sought out there was not just any landscape. He
between growing trees and tree-like columns, between lawn and roof, is explicit in the literally and analogously saw in it as way of recapturing something that was lost to him
built work.[90] when he vacated the Asolo flat – the view of Asolo’s mountaintoprocca. The Palazzetto
apartment relates to yet another important experience of loss that Scarpa associated
Scarpa’s freehand plan sketches of the Olivetti Camp project demonstrate his desire to with this particular landscape. It was here in Monselice, while painting the Monte Ricco
work with the “accidents’ of the site as Reynolds argued in his “13th Discourse,” creating many years earlier, that Scarpa realized his competence as a painter was not equal to
an asymmetrical assemblage of discrete, non-rectilinear forms, organizing along an his desire to be a painter (Pietropoli, May 1997). Although Scarpa gave up painting,
undulating spine. The center of one of these drawings, drawn in colored pencil oncarta focusing instead on the design of exhibitions, buildings, and gardens, the concepts and
lucida, was an assemblage of multiple views of the project on one sheet, which was techniques of painting continued to influence his productive activities.
characteristic of Scarpa’s manner of drawing. The center of the drawing, preserved in
the collection of the Carlo Scarpa Archive in Trevignano di Montebelluna, is occupied This view through the parete interrotta that Scarpa constructed returns us to the idea of
by a plan drawn free-hand and surrounded by sections, elevations, and other images the three natures – not Perrault’s three natures discussed above, but rather the earlier
of the project. The level of detail in the drawings suggests that this may have been one idea of “la terza natura.” John Dixon Hunt explains,
of the last sketches made before the project went through a relatively radical trans-
formation in the final design stage. In the final stage Scarpa geometricized the soft Cicero, in describing landscape, writes of what he calls a second nature: “We sow
figures, losing much of their quality of ambiguity between site and building that was one corn, we plant trees, we fertilize the soil by irrigation, we dam the rivers and direct
of the projects great strengths. In freehand plan, the arcing spine and the collections them where we want. In short, by means of our hands we try to create as it were
of pod-like elements literally weave their way through the existing network of trees on a second nature within the natural world.” (Hunt 2000, 33)
the site – at times surrounding the trees and at other times touching the very edge of
the existing trees through the use of terraces. It is clear that Scarpa was attempting to Bartolomeo Taegio and Jacopo Bonfadio in 16th-century Italy, following Cicero’s De
make a parallel between the morphology of the site and the morphology of the building natura deorum, invented the term “la terza natura,” to describe a kind of nature they
– between the structure of the building, and the structure of the site. Yet throughout the had encountered that was not accounted for in Cicero’s commentary. Hunt continues:
design of the camp he carefully maintained the distinction between the two.
Independently, or so it seems, Bartolomeo Taegio and Jacopo Bonfadio coined the
same term for gardens: a “third nature.” …[Bonfadio describes] his country retreat
3. “with our head between our legs” on Lake Garda to a friend left behind in the city, …. “For in the gardens…the indus-
try of the local people has been such that nature incorporated with art is made an
Scarpa always had one foot grounded firmly in the Veneto in which he lived, and the 6.13
other foot in a multitude of times and cultures. As an extension of this, Scarpa believed
like Michelangelo, Piranesi, Adam, Boullée, Payne Knight, Schinkel, Wright, Neutra,
Croce and many others, that movement, sensation, and taste were fundamental to both
the design and experience of architecture as well as a well-designed life. The view from
Scarpa’s intended apartment above the garages at the Villa Palazzetto is a fitting image
with which to conclude this study as it exemplifies this point, particularly in regards to
taste and his appreciation of landscape. Scarpa’s taste was certainly of the epicurean
variety, as described by Saisselin, rather than the later positivistic variety that seems
to have influenced Boullée. It is this concept of taste, combined with his understand-
ing of Vico’s concept of nature as read through Benedetto Croce and the model of the
Venetianbel paesaggio that all came together for Scarpa in the view from the window of
what was to have been his apartment at the Businaro estate in Monselice. The design
of the apartment was unfinished at the time of Scarpa’s death. This view, very similar
to the one he framed from the Gipsoteca Canoviana in Possagno and from the island
pavilion at the Brion sanctuary, was framed with a parete interrotta. The view is of the
mandorla-shaped Monte Ricco, foregrounded by arable fields. [6.12].

This view fulfilled two of Scarpa’s seminal desires: to frame views of the Veneto land-
scape corresponding to details of Venetian paintings, and the view he associated with
Asolo. Indeed, this apartment design was prompted largely by Scarpa’s having been
forced to vacate his flat in Asolo a few years earlier owing to the owner’s to desire
reoccupy the space.[91] Scarpa lived in the Asolo apartment for ten years (1962 to
1972). He loved the small medieval city. In particular Scarpa had a strong affinity
to the city’s history, fabric, and relative isolation (Brusatin 1984). After leaving Asolo
Scarpa and his wife lived in Treviso for a short time above the office of Luciano Gemin,
an associate of Scarpa’s on a number of projects.[92] The Scarpas ultimately relocated
to an apartment above the stables of the Villa Valmarana ai Nani in Vicenza (Gemin
1996). This was Carlo Scarpa’s last official home. While living in Vicenza the Businaro
estate in Monselice was a kind of second home for the Scarpas. Carlo and his wife Nini
often stayed there for extended periods, in part to hide from students and clients but
also to regain a more direct connection to the Veneto landscape.[93]

56
 George Dodds | University of Tennessee

6.14 6.15a 6.15b

artificer and naturally equal with art, and from them both together is made a third
nature, which I would not know how to name.” (Hunt 2000, 33)

Although Scarpa may have been unaware of Bonfadio’s and Taegio’s term, “la terza
natura,” he certainly was aware of the concept, which has much in common with Vico’s
ideas about the relation of human knowledge to the natural world. For Vico, the first
nature can only be comprehended through artifice. This artifice could include Taegio
and Bonfadio’s “second nature,” but is more directed towards the “third nature” and
art. Much of Scarpa’s knowledge of Vico comes from his reading of Croce. Hence, I
quote at length from Croce’s Aesthetic:

Any one who calls a landscape beautiful where the eye rests upon verdure, where
the body moves briskly and the warm sun envelops and caresses the limbs, does
not speak of anything aesthetic. But it is nevertheless indubitable that on other oc-
casions the adjective “beautiful,” applied to objects and scenes existing in nature,
has a completely aesthetic signification. (Croce 1909, 1978, 98)

Tacitly invoking Vico’s “verum ipsum factum” principal, Croce continues:

It has been observed that in order to enjoy natural objects aesthetically, we must
abstract their external and historical reality, and separate their simple semblance
or appearance from existence; that if we contemplate a landscape with our head
between our legs, so as to cancel our wonted relations with it, the landscape ap-
pears to us to be an ideal spectacle; that nature is beautiful only for him who
contemplates her with the eye of the artist; that zoologists and botanists do not
recognize beautiful animals and flowers; that natural beauty is discovered (and ex-
amples of discovery are the points of view, pointed out by men of taste and imagi-
nation, to which more or less aesthetic travellers (sic) and excursionists afterwards
have recourse to pilgrimage, whence a kind of collective suggestion); that, without
the aid of the imagination, no part of nature is beautiful, and that such aid the same
natural object or fact is, according to the disposition of the soul, now expressive,
now insignificant, now expressive of one definite thing, now of another, sad or glad,
sublime or ridiculous, sweet or laughable; finally, that a natural beauty which an
artist would not to some extent correct does not exist. (Croce 1909, 1978, 98-99)

In this philosophy, it is only through transforming the “first nature” through the process
of human action – which includes the construction of both borrowed views and physical
gardens – that “nature” is made to exist in the realm of human knowledge and aesthetic
experience. This is precisely what Scarpa did in Possagno and in San Vito di Altivole,
and it is what he had intended to do for himself in his apartment in Monselice. In this
simple space above the garage at the edge of the Businaro farm on the outskirts of
Monselice, Scarpa discovered the possibility of reacquiring – reoccupying – the type
of view that was lost to him when he was forced to vacate his apartment in Asolo. To
create this view of a mandorla-shaped mountain required him to construct a parete
interrotta through which this landscape is framed [6.4 & 6.15]. As an Italian, as a
Venetian – as a “student” of Vico, Croce, and Wright – Scarpa understood that there
6.16

58

were many kinds of landscapes through which nature is made visible. There is the bel
paesaggio of which the framed views of the Asolo rocca and the Monte Ricco at Mon-
selice are part, and there is also Sereni’s paesaggio agrario italiano, which foregrounds
the mandorla-shaped Monte Ricco that Scarpa framed with his new opening. Both of
these natures would have been opened to Scarpa with the “aid of [his] imagination,” and
the frame of the parete interrotta. At Possagno, San Vito di Altivole, and Monselice the
base material of nature is transformed through the intervention of a frame into some-
thing beautiful that is accessible to the mind and the spirit.
The symbolism of the threshing floor in the entrance courtyard at the Palazzetto al-
ludes to both myth and tradition. Moreover, the threshing floor is a clear example of
6.17 how Scarpa was able to think in broad and poetic terms about landscape while dealing
with the prosaic problems or renovating and reorganizing a 17th-century estate. The
threshing floor that Scarpa designed began as an oval shape and went through a series
of iterations before Scarpa arrived at its current form. The two circular shapes Scarpa
used in the plan of the threshing floor were understood by him to stand for the sun
and the moon (WATERI-UM, 1993).[6.13] [94] Aldo Businaro, the owner of the villa,
recalls that Scarpa honored him by telling him that the sun represented him and the
moon, his wife (Businaro interview May 1997). Scarpa’s drawings for the project reveal
that Scarpa aligned these two disks with two key elements in the overall landscape of
the villa complex. The larger (solar) disks aligns with a grouping of three small round
stones, imbedded into the ground at the entrance gate to the courtyard. Scarpa ex-
plained to Businaro that the stones represented his three sons (Businaro interview May
1997). The faceted surface of the threshing floor (similar to the elevated platforms in
6.18 the unbuilt third version of the IUAV entrance garden) makes this alignment visible in
the experience of the site. The seam connecting two canted planes of the threshing
floor leads directly to the three round stones marking the entrance. It is the other disk,
however, the smaller “moon” disk – the sign of the feminine – which is of greater inter-
est here. Scarpa aligned the female disk, not with the main entrance, but with the new
opening in the old storehouse that Scarpa converted to a car port, above which was
to be his apartment (Businaro interview, May 1997).[95] The opening leads to a large
enclosure including abrodo and the old threshing floor of the villa. The enclosure is
surrounded by a new stone wall built according to Scarpa’s plan for the renovation of
the complex (Businaro interview, April 1997). The axis aligning with the “moon” disk
and the opening in the garage continues through the walled brodo to the centerline
of a lattice gate designed by Scarpa. Through the lattice gate one sees the produc-
tive fields of the farm. Scarpa aligned the reproductive (read male) aspect of the villa
with the solar disk which, in turn, aligns with the main entrance and “the three sons.”
Scarpa aligned the female icon of the working villa (the lunar disk) with the produc-
tive brodo and campagna beyond, prompting an association between the working farm
and the agricultural goddess Demeter who used her moon-shaped sickle for, among
other purposes, castration.[96]
The symbolism of the threshing floor and the view from Scarpa’s hypothetical apart-
ment also prompts associations with the dual traditions of the Italian landscape – that
of agri-culture and as culture. These symbols refer to both the culture of feeding one’s
stomach from the paese+aggio,[97] and the culture of feeding one’s mind and spirit
through the bel paesaggio – the framed view of the Veneto as a the anthropomorphized
female body of a locus amoenus. For Paracelsus, for Wright, and for Scarpa, “This
physical body is not merely an instrument for divine power, but it is also the soil from
which that which is immortal in man receives its strength.” Scarpa desired all of these
“natures” at different times, for different reasons. From his apartment in Monselice, with
the “aid of his imagination,” mediated by the parete interrotta, he could view these vari-
ous natures with his “head between [his] legs,” whenever he chose, whenever it suited
his taste.
4. Unwritten | Unanswered
Among the key problems historians and critics confront when addressing Scarpa’s
work, the question of landscape and garden notwithstanding, are the many contradic-
60
George Dodds | University of Tennessee
tions in both the man and the works he produced. This is not to say that his oeuvre
is incoherent. Rather, to apprehend its coherence one must walk a fine line between
exploring its inherent contradictions and getting lost in the infinite dialectical regression
that his work engenders. There are many chapters, therefore, that remain unwritten but
whose topics were nonetheless considered in this study.
The topics on which future chapters could be written include the relations between
Scarpa’s productive activities and the works of John Ruskin, Edgar Allen Poe, Ray-
mond Roussel, Paul Valéry,[98] Benedetto Croce, Giambattista Vico, Bertrand Russell,
the American Transcendentalists, and the idea of the Picturesque. These writers and
movements occupy a significant percentage of his library. Among the architects and
artists whose work relates intimately to that of Scarpa and should be considered more
carefully are Camillo Boito,[99] Josef Hoffmann,[100] Paul Klee, Frank Lloyd Wright,
Mies van der Rohe, Alvar Aalto, Richard Neutra, Le Corbusier, and his collaboration
with Edoardo Detti.[101] There are a number of architects who were active in Califor-
nia during the 1940s and 1950s, many of whom history has largely forgotten, that may
be part of this story (Zevi 1950a, 477-507). Their work, which established a Modern
idiom in Southern California and elsewhere in the United States was published in vari-
ous Italian journals during the period, often as realized examples of “Organic Architec-
ture.”[102] The nature of this work, particularly regarding the question of architecture’s
relation to landscape, must have been profoundly important for Scarpa.[103] The rela-
tion of Scarpa to Zevi and their relation to the Organic Architecture Movement in gen-
eral, also require extensive study. Sadly, the death of Bruno Zevi has made this task
problematic (Sharp 2000, 7).[104]
Lastly, for garden and landscape historians, there is the question of Scarpa’s botanical
knowledge. He has not been given much credit in this regard by those who have stew-
ardship over his gardens, or by his clients.[105] Yet, his drawings for gardens are often
quite specific regarding the species of plants. Moreover, he often visited such botanical
gardens as the Villa Táranto in Pallanza (Gemin 1996, up). This area of northern Italy is
particularly known for its remarkable collection of botanical gardens owing to the good
graces of a microclimate that permits the growth of vegetation not possible elsewhere
in the region.[106]
Among Scarpa’s projects and built works that still requires more substantial research,
as difficult as it may be to believe, is the Brion sanctuary – even though it has been
the subject of dozens of articles, several exhibitions and accompanying catalogues,
and at least one Master’s thesis.[107] Scarpa’s study of non-western gardens, and
his relation to the gardens of Italy, the latter of which remains unclear, also merit more
careful elaboration. This list should also include Scarpa’s relation to surrealism, which
seems to have been as strong a motivating force in his work as was neo-Plasticism,
the latter of which has received the bulk of the attention in the literature.[108] Focus-
ing on the theme of landscape and garden in the work of Scarpa has required limiting
the treatment of some of these topics while deleting still others. Moreover, it has only
been during the past half-decade that the bulk of the archival material on Scarpa has
been made widely accessible, principally through the aegis of the Carlo Scarpa Archive
at the Archivio di Stato di Treviso which holds approximately 18,000 of his drawings.
Nonetheless, the collection of his drawings remains fragmented in various archives,
public and private, from Rome to Venice. And his personal library, as a discrete col-
lection of books and periodicals, is difficult to reconstruct, incorporated into the living
collection of Tobia Scarpa. Which explains how, in some surveys of Carlo Scarpa’s col-
lection, one finds books published well after his death. This does not mean that this rich
past is forever lost, only scattered. And while the examples of Scarpa’s work remains
scattered, the work itself suggestions a coherence that resists the vagaries of changes
in scale and program that typifies Scarpa’s oeuvre. While Scarpa was himself appar-
ently unable to write an extensive architectural criticism, he was nonetheless deeply
critical of the works he engaged, and his own process. Speaking of his arrangement of
exhibits at the Castlevecchio, Scarpa explained: “I have always consciously cultivated a
knowledge of [art], to know it very intimately, no - to comprehend it and also, it seems
to me, to have a substantially critical knowledge of it. Personally, I would not know how
to write, I could not be a critic, but I feel these [critical] values very deeply and, well,
6.19

theIn this same interview, for the RAI television production Intervista, Scarpa referred
to himself as “proprio Veneziano.” As a typical Venetian, indeed much like the city of
Venice itself during La Serenissima, Scarpa appropriated the various riches that he
discovered and used them as he saw fit. He often assembled this scattered source
material into wholly new amalgams (such as the detail from the plan of Broadacre
City and the Brion sanctuary) while at other times maintaining the literal identity of the
source (the Villa Veritti and the Venezuelan Pavilion). Scarpa transformed the sources
upon which he drew through a variety of means including changing its material, scale,
or structure. His relation to Wright – personally and professionally – will always remain
key to understanding Scarpa’s work, particularly with respect to the degree to which he
transformed his sources into wholly new works.
Of equal importance is Scarpa’s finely developed sense of taste. While accompanying
a group of students on a tour of the Brion sanctuary, Scarpa was queried by one of
the students about his use of the echelon motif. Scarpa explained that this was a very
basic motif found throughout the architecture of world and that he used it in order to
animate and make more complex what was ultimately very simple.
If you go to Cambodia, you find them there as well.… Listen, one can make [mo-
tifs] like this one.… In this way that which is too simple is made a little more com-
plicated. …One can make considerable variations on these themes. The question
is, how many transformations do you want or can one get with this very simple
thing... It is simply necessary to have some taste. I simply make several variations
and calculations and thought: this is good, this is bad.[110]
Scarpa was perhaps the only architect of his generation who spoke openly and frankly
about matters of taste. Peter Collins devotes an entire chapter of his Changing Ide-
als to “The Gastronomic Analogy.”
In a lecture on “The Principles of Design in Architecture,” given on December 9th,
1862…James Fergusson explained to his astonished audience that the process
by which a hut to shelter an image is refined into a temple…is the same as that
which refines a boiled neck of mutton into Côteletes à l’Impériale or a grilled fowl
into poulet à la Marengo. …No other architectural theorist, either before or since,
seems to have used this analogy; a very curious fact when one considers the gen-
eral cultural significance attached to the word ‘taste.’ ‘Taste,’ as early dictionaries
make clear, meant originally only ‘the sensation excited in certain organs of the
mouth,’ and its metaphorical adoption in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
as the standard term for what we now call ‘aesthetics’ implies a clear recognition
of the importance of this faculty as a key to understanding the nature of human
6.20
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George Dodds | University of Tennessee
discernment. (Collins 1998, 167)[111]
For Scarpa, taste was an essential element in everything he designed, ate, in the way
he lived, and in virtually every aspect of his life. This is just one of the many aspects to
his personality that made him the complex figure he was. Referring to the idea of taste
in 17th and 18th-century France, Rémy G. Saisselin explains”
The problems posed by taste [in 18th-century France] produced the same division
among philosophers which we have seen in regard to beauty: though everyone agreed
there were good and bad taste, there were divisions between relativists and absolut-
ists, skeptics and dogmatists, epicureans and puritans…. The early eighteenth century
tended to be rather skeptical and epicurean, therefore somewhat relativistic, with re-
gard to taste, while the later decades of the century tended more and more to insist
upon the invariable and universal in taste; or put in another way, the taste of the early
eighteenth century was more inclusive than exclusive, while the period of the triumph of
the philosophers tended to be more rationalistic and utilitarian. (Saisselin, 1970, 192)
Saisselin’s explanation illuminates the manner in which Boullée for example used taste
throughout his Essai, almost as an empirical yardstick against which architecture could
be judged vis-à-vis nature.
This change of attitude corresponds to the gradual depreciation of what was
termed the goût moderne in the fine arts and the greater emphasis put on the imi-
tation of the antique. But it also corresponds to the shift from an aesthetic founded
on the institution of art to one more and more justified in terms of nature. (Sais-
selin, 1970, 193)
Boullée’s Architecture, essai sur l’art may have had an important role to play, both
in Scarpa’s more mature understanding of the role of taste and in the design of the
Brion sanctuary. As discussed earlier, taste and character were fundamental crite-
ria by which Boullée designed and judged architecture. Aldo Rossi translated Boul-
lée’s essai into Italian and wrote an introduction just prior to Scarpa being given the
commission to design the Brion sanctuary.[112] The Rossi translation was published
in 1967, within a year of the publication of L’architettura della città (Rossi 1966) – which
incidentally was the same year as the publication of the Italian translation of The Living
City and Scarpa’s trip to North America. The essai was widely distributed throughout
Italy in the dispensi format – an inexpensive paperback pamphlet for course work in
Italian academies.[113] The dispensa lacked Boullée’s critical drawings, making it dif-
ficult for the reader to associate image and text – an important subtext of the work. The
Rossi translation was required reading in most Italian architectural programs in the late
1960s, occupying a significant place within the intellectual landscape of the period.
6.21
 George Dodds | University of Tennessee

[114] Boullée discovered his “architecture of shadows” – which he considered par-

ticularly suitable for funereal monuments – while walking in a moonlit garden. Scarpa,
who was prone to outbursts of grandiose eloquence while tipping his hat and bowing
at the moon – which he considered the mother of landscape and architecture – once
explained that the best time to see the Brion garden was in February, under the light
of a full moon.

Scarpa’s rare recorded utterances that have been transcribed and the countless anec-
dotes that survive him continue his memory in what has become a form of oral tradi-
tion. My role in the polythetical construction of this “network of associations” has not
been that of the prosecution, but that of the defense. Donald Kunze explains:

The polythetic method might be classed as one kind of ‘fuzzy logic,’ but its history
is more modest. When numerical taxonomy began to develop in Great Britain with
attempts to mathematically classify prisoners and other populations, researchers
realized that individual’s attributes were not necessarily clear cut. No one single at-
tribute could be used to include or exclude one case from a group (the ‘monothetic
set’ situation). To accommodate reality, the idea of the polythetic set was invented:
a looser matrix where missing or extra parts are tolerated and where pattern be-
comes the dominant idea. One official definition comes from the archaeologist,
David Clarke: “An aggregate of entities or systems are said to be polythetic if each
individual possesses a large but…unspecified number of the attributes of the ag-
gregate, if each attribute is possessed by large numbers of these…individuals,
and no single attribute is both sufficient and necessary to the aggregate member-
ship.” In short, an example can’t be excluded or included on the basis of the pres-
ence or absence of a single feature. This puts emphasis on pattern and network
relationships, where there is a potential loss of detail, usually from the processes
of translation, falsification, adaptation, and cultural displacement. [115]

I have not attempted to defend either Scarpa, or his work, but rather to offer a productive
alternative to the received view of his work – a preponderance of evidence that Scarpa
is not the provincial and typically narrowly interpreted caricature that is the product of
the many articles and books in which the same information and interpretation about the
same buildings and same details and the same materials are repeated. Scarpa is a far
more interesting, complex and in the end, a more comprehensible figure than has been
evident in the literature to date. For Scarpa, the power of architecture was not limited
to its capacity to create discrete objects, but included its capacity to create an extended
landscape for living in which the distinction between figure and field is at times ambigu-
ous, but is always discernable (Eckbo 1950). This does not mean that Scarpa wished
for architecture to disappear into a site – be it urban or rural (Leatherbarrow 1993, 21-
23). The value of an architecture such as the one Scarpa often produced, is judged
by how well it makes us question such commonplaces as the distinction between past
and present, inside and outside, figure and field, garden and building, landscape and
architecture, in an oscillating field of experience.

At the close of the 20th century, the terms “landscape” and “architecture” each became
the perfect metaphor for the other, albeit imperfectly defined. The blurring of the distinc-
tions between architecture and landscape seems to have created a problem needing
resolution in such spheres as academia and the professions where discrete boundaries
of practice are associated with tenure or the necessity of professional licensure. This
study has attempted to clarify how Scarpa was able to harness the creative energy cre-
ated by these diffuse boundaries and how they contributed to an intelligent complexity
in his oeuvre, spanning from the hortus conclusus of the Fondazione Querini Stampalia
to the campagna of Fusina Camping, from the productive agrarian landscape of the
Villa Palazzetto to the bel paesaggio of the Brion Sanctuary.

64
 George Dodds | University of Tennessee

Notes confusion lie,/And with one dazzling waste fatigue the eye.’ Obviously such a scene cannot be picturesque
landscape, even by a Dutch painter like Avvercamp who specialised in winter scenes: Philip’s landscape simply
has no variety. What for Pope is clearly picturesque about it is that it is an apt setting for the writer of an epistle
[1] This is comprehensively covered in Chapter IV. It is clear that Scarpa’s overall architectural project envi-
which is entitled To the Earl of Dorset from Copenhagen (Hunt 1987, 33).
sioned an uninterrupted series of discrete spaces, formed by changes in surface, elevation, and materials, that
begins in the Campiello Querini and ends in the garden. This is confirmed both in Scarpa’s drawings and in
[15] See (Frascari 1986, 2-7). Collins has been criticized of late for over-simplifying the complex. In particular,
the subtle use of travertine and concrete in the finishes of the walls and floor of the exhibition room. The line
his choice of the date of 1750 as being the “ground zero” for the paradigm shift that ultimately resulted in Modern
separating the wall clad in panels of Roman travertine and the floor made of polished precast concrete panels
Movement architecture, has come under attack. In a recent symposium at the Canadian Centre for Architecture,
is marked by a horizontal line of Prun stone. This line of Prun stone aligns precisely with the elevation of the
Alberto Perez-Gomez, among others, characterized Collins as “positivistically” choosing this date while ignoring
garden. The volume of space of that is implied by the Prun stone line and concrete surfaces is an inversion of
earlier events that place the break between pre-modernity and modernity.[15] Kenneth Frampton, in his intro-
the solid mass of the elevated garden beyond.
duction to the recent reprint of Collins’s Changing Ideals in Modern Architecture,explains: “Collins situated the
beginning of modernity around 1750, not least because this was the moment of the definitive institutional break
[2] Scarpa designed this in collaboration with the engineer Carlo Maschietto. Although the Opera completa lists
between architecture and civil engineering as announced by the foundation of Jean-Rodolphe Perronet’s Ecole
dates of the project as 1974-75, the owner Aldo Businaro confirms the dates of 1969-78 (Businaro interview
des ponts et chaussée in 1747 (Frampton 1998, viii).” Happily, this study is unfettered by the specificity of the
May 1997).
birth date of modernity. Whether it occurred a century earlier in France, three centuries earlier in Italy, with the
rise of Emperor Charlemagne or the fall of the Roman Empire, is of little moment here (Rykwert 1980; Perez-
[3] Perhaps more than any other text, Ruskin’s three volumes, The Stones of Venice, had an enduring impact
Gomez, 1983). Nor does Collins’s choice of 1750 diminish the value of his insights that were well grounded in
on how Scarpa viewed the city of Venice, particularly in terms of how he understood the ruin of its fabric and the
close readings of primary sources in architecture, landscape architecture, philosophy, biology and other related
nature of its landscape. For Ruskin, Venice was less a city than it was a densely populated landscape composed
disciplines. What is at issue is the insight Collins brings to the question of the relation between landscape design
of, in addition to its ruined monuments-- islands, waterways, lagoons, marshes, arable land, Alpine mountains
and architectural design.
and, of course, the sea. Ruskin discovered in the Venice of the mid-19th century a human-made landscape
much in ruin. Yet, it was still possible at that time to experience parts of the surrounding landscape that were
[16] Collins used his book Changing Ideals, as required reading in his history course alongside Giedi-
largely unspoiled. Scarpa often quoted a passage from The Stones of Venice, in which Ruskin lamenting the
on’s Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition.
construction of the railway bridge and the subsequent loss of what had been, until then, a slow, quiet, aquatic
entrance into Venice. (Guido Pietropoli, Interview, April, 1997.) Seemingly with the landscapes of Mantegna,
[17] See (Scott 1914, 86-87).
Giovanni Bellini, Giorgione and Titian in mind, Ruskin invokes his own invented memory of the experience of
arriving at Venice from Padua. ” As the boat drew nearer to the city, the coast which the traveler had just left
[18] It is significant that when Wöfflin (from whom Giedion derived his basic ideas about the primacy of space
sank behind him into one long, low, sad-colored line, tufted irregularly with brushwood and willows: but, at what
in art-historical analysis) discusses architectural space most eloquently, it is with reference to the painting of an
seemed its northern extremity, the hills of Arqua rose in a dark cluster of purple pyramids, balanced on the bright
architectural interior, rather than to an architectural interior itself. Altdorfer’s early sixteenth century painting of
mirage of the lagoon; … and beyond these, beginning with the craggy peaks above Vicenza, the chain of the
the bir th of the Virgin, he tells us, characterizes well the fundamental difference between the German and Italian
Alps girded the whole horizon to the north and there showing through its clefts a wilderness of misty precipices,
conceptions of space, since here ‘space is undefined and in motion,’ whereas with Brunelleschi all forms are
… of Cadore, …rising and breaking away eastward, … into mighty fragments of peaked light, …, until the eye
defined and distinct. In Altdorfer’s interior, he continues, the nave and aisles flow into one another, ‘and what is
turned back from pursuing them, to rest upon the nearer burning of the campaniles of Murano, and on the great
more, a rotating, whirling movement throws the entire space into a turmoil.’
city, where it magnified itself along the waves, as the quick silent pacing of the gondola drew nearer and nearer.
…When Wöfflin discusses Baroque interiors, his descriptions are almost indistinguishable from Giedion’s de-
... Well might it seem that such a city had owed her existence rather to the rod of the enchanter, than the fear
scription of the Space-Time experien…I would suggest that in fact the visual effects usually referred to as
of the fugitive; that the waters which encircled her had been chosen for the mirror of her state, rather than the
Space-Time, Fourth-Dimensional, and so on, are nothing more or less than modern developments of the exploi-
shelter of her nakedness...” See (Ruskin, 1851, Volume II, 2-3).
tation of effects of parallax…whereby an apparent displacement of objects occurs when the point of observation
changes…. (Collins 1998, 291-292)
[4] There are, of course, exceptions to this, but in many cases, examinations of the drawings of a project, the
built version of which seems an exception, reveals that Scarpa had envisioned garden elements that were not
[19] Giedion eliminated any reference to the Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion, for example, in the first
realized in the construction. This is clearly the case at the Banca Popolare di Verona, discussed in Chapter III.
edition of Space, Time and Architecture. It does not appear until the 3rd edition in 1954, at which point Giedion
suddenly describes it as “daring” demonstrating “with unsurpassed precision …pure surfaces and precious ma-
[5] The drawings in the collection of Aldo Businaro show a stair supported by a parete interrotta that would have
terials as elements of the new space conception.” See (Giedion 1956, 545). This citation is from the “enlarged
connected the level of the threshing floor that Scarpa designed (using the image of the sun and the moon). The
1956 printing of the 1954 edition. Collins may not have consulted the revised 3rd edition before publishing Chang-
stair is very similar to the one he designed for the courtyard of the Castelvecchio.
ing Ideals in Modern Architecture, but it he had, it probably would not have caused him to alter the terms of his
argument. See Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition (Cambridge:
[6] Scarpa owned two copies of Choisy’s Historie de l’architecture.
Harvard University Press, 1941).
[7] Emphasis added.
[20] I have excluded from this list Abbé Marc-Antoine Laugier and William Kent. Laugier, in Essai sur
l’architecture, argues that architecture is most correct when it imitates most closely and directly the elements
[8] See (Stilgoe 1982, 12). Also see (Hunt 2000, 1 and 217).
of the natural world in the manner nature had intended them to be perceived. The frontispiece to the second
edition to the Essai, an engraving of the personification of architecture pointing at the primitive hut made of living
[9] “Estensione di territorio di vaste dimensioni, abitato e coltivato, e individuato da peculiari e omogenee ca-
trees and broken limbs still bearing green leaves, is a familiar symbol of this schema. In the collection of Sir
ratteristiche fisiche e antropiche.” “Differenza in più (vantaggio) tra il valore nominale e il valore reale della
John Soane’s Museum, London, is a watercolor by J. M. Gandy, Architecture: Its Natural Model, that seems to
moneta; interesse, sconto, percentuale che si accorda dei cambi, nelle contrattazioni, nei prestiti.” See (Battaglia
perfectly represent Laugier description of the founding of the primitive hut. Gandy depicts a landscape of rock
1980). Hence, in Italian, paesaggio refers not simply to a view of land, or even an image of land, but the value of
formations, natural caves, and a hut, built of upright bundles of reeds, roofed with palm leaves. Yet, there is noth-
that land, and, by extension, the value of the image of the land, the character of which is of a consistent nature.
ing in either Gandy’s or Laugier’s illustrations of the primitive hut that suggests that either was thinking about
architecture through the mediated nature of landscape (Laugier 1765). William Kent produced important works
[10] It later returned to Italy in the 20th century in the works of Russell Page and Cecil Pinsent. See (Galletti,
of both landscape and architecture. Yet, I have found no evidence to support the notion that Kent intended to blur
1996, 51-69.).
the distinction between the two or, for that matter, thought about architecture through the paradigm of landscape,
which is the issue at hand (Hunt 1987). Clearly his works and Walpole’s writings on him, however, did much to
[11] This helps to explain, for example, why Benedetto Croce, a historian of aesthetics who must have been su-
indirectly propel this paradigm. Writing in part as a response to Whately’s Observations, Horace Walpole in his
premely influential in Scarpa’s intellectual development, fails to mention the Picturesque at all, save for a cursory
encomium of William Kent, The History of the Modern Taste In Gardening, chose to ignore, largely for political
discussion of Edmund Burke’s concepts of the Sublime and the Beautiful (Croce 1909, 259-260). The Pictur-
reasons, earlier examples of the “natural” taste in garden art that occurred France, Italy and elsewhere (England
esque as an idea is something, the roots of which can be traced back to Venetian Renaissance painting, but as a
included). In order to establish an unambiguously English origin of this “modern taste,” Walpole mythologized
landscape tradition in Italy, is a 20th-century phenomenon, primarily practiced by foreigners. See (Galletti 1996).
its birth, creating in the figure of William Kent a singular hero of the “natural” garden. See Horace Walpole, The
History of the Modern Taste in Gardening (New York: Ursus Press, 1995): 49. [Originally published, 1780]. Also
[12] Hunt argues: “In the absence of any serious or sustained interest in the history and theory of its field from
see Thomas Whately, Observations on Modern Gardening (New York: Garland, 1982): 151. [Originally published
professionals or from the majority of programs within the academy that train them, the most energetic ap-
London, 1770]. For Walpole and Kent, gardens did not imitate the kind of inchoate natural world that Edmund
proaches to the study of landscape architecture have come primarily from academic historians of architecture
Burke had identified with the sublime -- high mountains, rough seas, arid deserts or dense and treacherous
and art (Hunt 2000, 217). See (Corner 1999). Also see (Meyer 1997; 1992, 155-172; 1991), and (Trieb 1993).
forests. Rather, they feigned the beautiful forms of an unattainable Arcadia. See Edmund Burke, A Philosophi-
cal Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, James T. Boulton, ed. (Notre Dame:
[13] See Humphrey Repton, The Landscape Gardening and Landscape Architecture of the Late Humphry Rep-
University of Notre Dame Press, 1968). [Originally published, 1757].
ton, edited by John Claudius Loudon (London: 1840): 228 and 365. Cited in (Hunt 2000, 131).
[21] Robin Middleton argues, “Adam’s concept of movement in architecture, whether space or form, he related
[14] John Dixon Hunt explains that the use of the term by Alexander Pope at the beginning of the 18th century
directly to landscape architecture – though it is important to note that he had already outlined the concept as
differs from that of “Gilpin, Price and Knight at the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th century. For Pope
early as 1758, long before the appearance in 1770 of Thomas Whately’s Observations on Modern Gardening,
it is a French term and means picture-like, and while it may include landscape features it does not refer to them
the pioneering study on picturesque gardening.” See (Middleton 1994, 12)..
solely. Pope instances his understanding of the term with a couplet by Ambrose Philips: ‘All hid in snow, in bright

66

[22] In his Observations, Whately made a number of significant contributions to landscape discourse, not the
least of which are his distinction between the “emblematical” and “expressive” and the relationship of the char-
acter of an existing site to the nature of the “improvements” being proposed. Having listed the typical devices
of landscape design -- sculptures of mythological figures, cascades populated with river gods and inscribed
columns -- Whately concludes, “All these devices are rather emblematical than expressive; they may be inge-
nious contrivances, and recall absent ideas to the recollection; but they make no immediate impression; for they
must be examined, compared, perhaps explained, before the whole design of them is will understood....” For
Whately, any fabrique incorporated into a landscape should be so discretely placed so as to appear to have
been “suggested by the scene...free from the detail of an allegory.” Thomas Whately,Observations on Modern
Gardening (New York: Garland, 1982): 151. [Originally published London, 1770]. Whately’s argument centers
around the quality of the experience of being in the landscape. Any specific references to things external to a
given setting are, for Whately, unwanted distractions. They are not only foreign intrusions to the scene, but more
importantly by virtue of their analogy, they require one to intellectually leap the fence of the garden to some
other place. For Whately, egregious forms of imitation distract one’s attention from the appropriate locus of
contemplation, which is the consistently constructed ensemble of the landscape view. Whately concludes that
gardening must aspire to more than mere imitation, but must “create original characters, and give expressions
to the several scenes superior to any they can receive from allusions.” Ibid., p. 153.
[23] David Summers explains, “When writers as important to Italian Renaissance art as Leon Battista Alberti and
Leonardo da Vinci wrote that the depiction of movement was the very highest importance for the art of painting,
they argued in this way because they assumed it was the movement of the body that made the movements of
the soul apparent. That is, they assumed, as their readers assumed, that all living matter was ‘animated,’ literally
‘inspired’ or ensouled (Summers 1987, 110).” Later Summers explains that the idea of “movement” in the Italian
Renaissance was largely based on Aquinas’s argument that equated all sensation with movement. “Aquinas
firm rejects the idea that the common sensibles are objects of a separate common sense; and arguing from the
principle that sensation is a ‘movement,’ a being acted upon and altered, he distinguishes between two ways in
which such alteration may be effected (Summers 1987, 152.) Also see Thomas Aquinas, De anima II, vi. 389-
95, in Aristotle’s De anima in the Version of William of Moerbeke and the Commentary of St. Thomas Aquinas,
translated by K. Foster and S. Humphries (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1951): 256-258.
[24] Robert and James Adam, The Works in Architecture of Robert and James Adam, Esquires (London: Peter
Elmsly, 1778): UP.
[25] Boullée bequeathed his writings and the bulk of his drawings, unpublished and unfinished at the time of his
death (1799), to the Biblioteque Nationale as both a civic gesture and in order to assure the perpetuation of his
work. The essai remained in manuscript form until its publication in 1953. Consequently, the historiographic lin-
eage of an emerging French architectural discourse beginning with Perrault’s translation and commentary of Vit-
ruvius (1673 and 1684), continuing through the Abbé Laugier’s Essai (1752), Blondel’s Cours d’Architecture ...,
(1771), and Le Camus’s, The Genius of Architecture ..., (1780), must bypass Boullée’s Architecture, essai sur
l’art, in lieu of the publications of Ledoux, Quattremère de Quincy and Boullée’s student, J.N.L. Durand. While at
the time of his death Boullée left behind a loyal and enthusiastic entourage of former students and colleagues
many of whom might have seen to the publication of his essai and its accompanying plates, the nature of both
his projects and his textual discourse made the political and professional liability of its publication extremely
problematic and potentially hazardous. Indeed, while Boullée’s enthusiasm for Edmund Burke’s essay on the
sublime may have been fashionable in the pre-Revolutionary days during which he probably began writing, fol-
lowing the publication of Burke’s, Reflections on the Revolution in France, (1790), any affinity for Burke’s ideas,
political or otherwise, would certainly have led to unseemly consequences. For a comparison of Boullée’s
and Le Camus’s writings, see Robin Middleton’s “Introduction” to, Nicolas Le Camus de Mézières, David Britt,
trans., The Genius of Architecture; or, The Analogy of that Art with our Sensations (Santa Monica: The Getty
Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1992). For a further comparison of Le Camus and Boullée,
along with a more extensive summation of Le Camus’ treatise than is provided in the Middleton essay see, Rémy
G. Saisselin’s, “Architecture and Language: The Sensationalism of Le Camus De Mézières,” The British Journal
of Aesthetics (Volume 15, No. 3, Summer, 1975): 239-253.
[26] The polymorphous idea of nature changes from epoch to epoch signaling both a reconfiguration of the re-
lationship of humankind to its environs as well each epoch’s idea of what constitutes the character of self. A. O.
Lovejoy has isolated sixty-six different senses of the word. See, Ar thur O. Lovejoy, Gilbert Chinard, George Boas
and Ronald S. Crane, eds., A Documentary History of Primitivism and Related Ideas, Volume One: Primitivism
and Related Ideas in Antiquity, (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1935): 447-56. R. G. Collingwood explains
that for the ancient Ionians, the term nature referred to the stuff of which the world is made only in a very second-
ary sense. Indeed, its primary use was more akin to the more modern idea of one’s character. Or, put another
way, in Fourth century B.C. Greece, nature (character) was distinct from custom. “A world is thus a thing that
makes itself wherever a vortex arises in the Boundless; hence a world is also a world-maker or a god. The na-
tura naturata of this world (to anticipate a very much later distinction) is finite in extent and in the duration of its
life; but its natura naturans is the creative nature of the Boundless and of its rotary movement, and hence eternal
and infinite.” See, The Idea of Nature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981): 35. [First published by Oxford
Clarendon Press, 1945]. Later, in the naturalistic philosophy of the Renaissance, Collingwood explains that na-
ture was regarded, “as something divine and self-creative; the active and passive sides of this one self-creative
being they distinguished by distinguishingnatura naturata, or the complex of natural changes and processes,
from natura naturans, or the immanent force which animates and directs them.” Ibid., p. 94. Consequently,
the natura naturans is contradictorily active yet immutable while natura naturata is passive yet is the visible sign
of change. Natura naturata is passive because it receives and translates the inchoate force of natura naturans.
[27] Recognizing that “nature” is itself a construct, the meaning of which is often densely compacted within a
given culture, Rémy G. Saisselin explains: “Looking back upon the eighteenth century, we may say that the term
‘nature’ was what might be called an open one: indeed, one could even go so far as to call it wide open. Nature
many even be to blame for the French Revolution, and all that followed; it was the Pandora’s box of the philos-
ophes. The end-all and be-all of philosophical enterprise, it justified philosophes and anti-philosophes, painters
and poets, and atheists, deists, and theist as well as Christians. To some it was the source of goodness, to
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George Dodds | University of Tennessee
others a source of evil (Saisselin 1970, 122).” Also see (Voegelin 1990, 71-88).
[28] Perrault’s three natures should not be confused with Bartolomeo Taegio’s (1559) and Jacopo Bonfadio’s
(1541) earlier tripartite definition of nature, of which Perrault presumably was unaware (Hunt 2000, 32-33). It is
this later, French idea of “three natures,” however, that is at issue here. The earlier Italian model is discussed
later in Chapter VI.
[29] For a discussion of Boullée’s library relative to Rousseau, see Jean-Marie Pérouse de Montclos, Étienne-
Louis Boullée, Architecture, (1728-1799) – De l’architecture classique à l’architecture révolutionaire (Paris: Arts
et Métiers, 1967): 254.
[30] Joseph Disponzio, “The French Landscape Designer and Theorist Jean-Marie Morel,” presented in John
Dixon Hunt’s seminar on landscape history at the University of Pennsylvania (1995).
[31] Robin Middleton has gone so far as to argue that Boullée “seems to have taken [Le Camus de Mézières’
treatise] as the point of departure for his excursus into a theory of architecture of light and shade.” See (Middle-
ton 1992, 61).What Boullée may have learned from Watelet, on the other hand, is not limited to textual sources
alone. Watelet is also responsible for producing the first “picturesque” garden in France at his estate, Moulin-Joli,
which he began shortly after purchasing the property in 1755.
[32] Architecture, p.106.
[33] Ibid. See (Kaufmann 1952, 436-473). This essay was followed by his more expansive and synthetic, Ar-
chitecture in the Age of Reason: Baroque and Post-Baroque in England, Italy and France (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1955).
[34] See Architecture, p. 113. In Book Two, Alberti lays out the difference between the drawing of the painter and
the drawing of the architect. The painter, “takes pains to emphasize the relief of objects in paintings with shading
and diminishing lines and angles; the architect rejects shading, but takes his projections from the ground plan
and, without altering the lines and by maintaining the true angles, reveals the extent and shape of each eleva-
tion and side -- he is one who desires his work to be judged not by deceptive appearances [read perspective
or chiaroscuro] but according to certain calculated standards.” Leon Battista Alberti, On the Art of Building in
Ten Books, Joseph Rykwert, Neil Leach and Robert Tavernor, trans. (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1989): 34The
origin of architecture is inextricably tied, for Boullée, to the mythical origin of painting as recounted by Pliny the
Elder in his Natural History. A favorite theme of Enlightenment artists for two centuries, the story was painted
or engraved by Charles Le Brun (c.1676), Charles-Nicolas Cochin Jr. (1769), Joseph-Benoît Suvée (c.1771),
David Allan (1773), and Karl Friedrich Schinkel (1830). Weaving the origin of painting into the productive activ-
ity of the architect as artist, Boullée explains, “Everyone knows the effect of volumes placed against the light:
the result, as we know, is that the shadows reproduce these volumes. We owe the birth of the art of painting to
this phenomenon. Love, it is said, inspired the beautiful Dibutades. As for me, I owe my inspiration to my love
for my profession.” See Architecture, p. 106. For the probable source of the story see, Pliny the Elder, Natural
History, vol. xxxv: 151. Also see, K. Jex-Blake, The Elder Pliny’s Chapters on the History of Art (London, 1896);
Reprinted (Chicago: Argonaut, 1968). For a discussion of the story as a popular trope of Romantic Classicism,
see Robert Rosenblum, “The Origin of Painting: A Problem in the Iconography of Romantic Classicism,” The Art
Bulletin, xxxix (1957): 279-290. However, while architectural drawing is related to this tradition, it is not grounded
in quite the same kind of mimetic act as is traditional western painting. Rather, unlike Pliny’s description of the
Corinthian maiden Butades, tracing the shadowed figure of her soldier-lover so that she may remember him
more clearly while he is off to battle, the architect does not usually engage in the mnemonic activity of making
isotropic representations of things that already exist. Aristotle, in the Poetica, makes the distinction between
simple isotropic imitations of form on the one hand, and imitations of actions on the other. “It clearly follows that
the poet or “maker” should be the maker of plots rather than of verses; since he is a poet because he imitates,
and what he imitates are actions. ” See, Poetica 1451b 27. In, “The Origin of Building,” Vitruvius, describes the
first architecture as being a simple imitation of the constructions of the animal kingdom. “[T]hey began, some to
make shelters of leaves, some to dig caves under hills, some to make of mud and wattles places for shelter, imi-
tating the nests of swallows and their methods of building.” See De Architecttura, II: 1. Indeed, while the survey
drawing is an important type and instrument of architectural representation, it is not the primary one. In contrast
to Alberti’s conception of the painter as one who is solely concerned, “with representing only what can be seen,”
(as in a survey), that is, what can be seen by the outer eye, the architect, by contrast, must inherently engage in
the speculative and sometimes specious activity of drawing things that do not yet exist in the three dimensional
world, that is, drawing with the inner eye. In the opening passages of Book One of De Pictura, Alberti distin-
guishes between the work of the mathematician and the work of the artist. In order to delimit the proper subject
matter appropriate for the study of painters, Alberti explains, “Mathematicians measure the shapes and forms of
things in the mind alone and divorced entirely from matter. We, on the other hand, who wish to talk of things that
are visible, will express ourselves in cruder terms.” In the next paragraph Alberti concludes, “No one will deny
that things which are not visible do not concern the painter, for he strives to represent only the things that are
seen.” Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting, Cecil Grayson, trans. (London: Penguin Books, 1991):
[35] See (Lee 1940, 197-269). Also see (Praz 1970) and (Rykwert 1980), particularly Chapter Two. The primacy
of painting over poetry is reversed soon after this by Hegel.
[36] Architecture, p. 88. Martin Bressani in an attempt to read the work of Boullée through the philosophy of Em-
manuel Kant, argues, “The scattered beauties referred to by Boullée are not Winckelmann’s gracious maidens
but cubes, pyramids, and spheres.” What precisely would have been the cause for these pure Platonic forms
to be “scattered” remains unclear in Bressani’s text (Bressani 1993, 43). On the story of Zeuxis, see Cicero, De
Inventione, II, I:1-3. Also see, Pliny the Elder, Natural History, XXXIV: 65. Alberti, who refers to Zeuxis’s recom-
binatory practice throughout his essay recounts, “Zeuxis, the most eminent, learned and skilled painter of all,
when about to paint a panel for be publicly dedicated in the temple of Lucina at Croton, did not set about his work
trusting rashly in his own talent like all painters do now; but, because he believed that all the things he desired to
achieve beauty not only could not be found by his own intuition, but were not to be discovered even in Nature in

one body alone, he close from all the youth of the city five outstanding beautiful girls, so that he might represent
in his painting whatever feature of feminine beauty was most praiseworthy in each of them.” See, On Painting, p.
91. In his overview of the western mimetic tradition, Karl Morrison also retells the story of Zeuxis. “The people
of Croton, Cicero wrote, commissioned Zeuxis to paint a picture of Helen of Troy. Instead of selecting one living
model, he combined features of five different women, achieving a “form of beauty” in which all participated but
which none fully represented.” See The Mimetic Tradition of Reform in the West (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1982): 126. This ritual process of constructing monsters is explained by the anthropologist Victor Turner,
“...thus a monster disguise may combine human, animal, and vegetable features in an ‘unnatural’ way, while the
same features may be differently, but equally ‘unnaturally’ combined in a painting or described in a tale.” See,
Victor Turner, From Ritual to Theater: The Human Seriousness of Play (New York: PAJ Publica[37] Ibid., p. 90.
[37] Yet, the act of drawing what is not in front of you, of drawing what is not seen, is no less embedded within
the western mnemonic tradition. For Boullée, drawing what is not seen, that is, drawing with the inner eye, is a
function of Genius. Genius is discussed later in the section on Character.
[38] Ibid. Some of Boullée’s 5 ink wash renderings of his project for the Newton Cenotaph appear in virtually
every historical survey of architecture. They are a plan view (where the top of the dome is shown in elevation
and not cut), two sections (one representing day and the other night in the interior), an elevation, and a The
section of the cenotaph’s interior volume, rendered as night, suggests far more than the image of a possible ar-
chitecture – it suggests a connection between the cenotaph and the representation of nature through the optical
effects of the camera obscura. The effects of the camera obscura were known since antiquity – that light passing
through a small hole into a darkened chamber would carry with it, the inverted image of the exterior. Their use
became increasingly popular during the seventeenth and eighteenth century, used by such artists as Vermeer
and Canelletto. See, Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (Chicago:
The University of Chicago Press, 1983). Particularly Chapter Two. Various engravings of the cameras from
the 17th and 18th centuries invariably represent a small enclosure in a rural or agrarian setting, projecting the
light-filled exterior natural world upside-down and backwards onto the wall of the dark interior volume. The
camera obscura also figured prominently in the philosophical and scientific writings of many of Boullée’s intel-
lectual mentors, Descartes, Newton, Leibniz and Locke. The camera housed a single viewer who watched a
three-dimensionally projected world. Descartes’ experiments with thecamera obscura included his use of the
disembodied eye of a cow which, stripped of its inner membrane, was used as a lens through which an image
was projected. “Having done this,” Descartes observed, “if you look at the white sheet you will see there, not
perhaps without pleasure and wonder, a picture representing in natural perspective all the objects outside.”
See René Descartes, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff and Dugald
Murdoch, trans. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985): Vol. 1, p. 166. Also see, Jonathan Crary, The
Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: The MIT Press,
1990): 47. However, unlike Descartes’ camera bovina which projects a single image for a single viewer, in the
cenotaph, Boullée provides us with a camera varia which houses multiple images of nature viewed by the many
gathered about the base of Newton’s alter.
[39] Boullée’s celebrated ink washes of the section through the cenotaph depict its extreme polarities of night
and day. Yet it is illuminating to imagine what the interior of Boullée’s sphere would have been like between these
two extremes, in a diffuse early morning haze. As morning intensifies and the sun rises above the Cypresses
that ring the spring line of the dome, the light passing through the occuli would project the multiple images of na-
tura naturans outside onto the natura naturata inside. At a certain moment of the day, the intense mid-morning
light would project the actual nature outside into an inverted image of nature inside, caught for an instant on the
concave surface of the dome’s interior. At this moment, when multiple inverted retinal images of actual nature
are equipoised with the virtual nature Boullée has constructed inside his cenotaph, it is possible to see in this
image what Johannes Wilde saw in Giorgione’s painting Laura, an experience where – “figure and surrounding
are inseparable.”
[40] It is difficult to overestimate the influence of Reynolds’s annual lectures as they literally set the standards by
which the Royal Academy established its practices and curriculum (Wark 1997, xiv).
[41] In one of his lectures at the Royal Academy as the Professor of Architecture, Soane comments, much in the
manner of Reynolds, “The lumière mystérieuse, so successfully practised by the French artist, is a most powerful
agent in the hands of a man of genius, and its power cannot be too fully understood, not too highly appreci-
ated. It is, however, little attended to in our Architecture, and for this obvious reason, that we do not sufficiently
feel the importance of Character in our buildings.” See (Soane, 1929, 126).
[42] Summerson continues: “I call it ‘Picturesque’ because I think his work during this period is analogous to that
of the school of the landscapists and theoreticians of the Picturesque School. …[Soane’s] intensive study [of
Price and Knight] greatly widened his horizon and, belatedly, induced him to think of his own style as one uniting
the potentialities not only of different kinds of classicism but of Gothic as well. ….Gothic effects and Picturesque
effects were to him synonymous; they were the ‘Poetry of Architecture’ which he speaks of in his won descrip-
tion of the breakfast room at the Soane Museum(Summerson 1983, 14).” Like Boullée and Piranesi, Soane
had great admiration for the work of the Adam brothers ultimately purchasing the collection of their architectural
drawings. Robin Middleton argues: “Soane’s knowledge of picturesque theory is less fully attested [however,
than is Adam’s]. Soane had only one of William Gilpin’s books in his library; his copy of Uvedale Price’s Essay on
the Picturesque, of 1794 was purchased only in August 1827…. But Soane must have read Price’s work much
earlier, for there is a copy of the second edition of 1796 in his library and Price’s ideas are in evidence in both the
sixth and the ninth of [Soane’s] Academy lectures. Soane’s encounter with Payne Knight is less problematical, he
bought the Analytical Enquiry into the Principles of Taste on its first appearance, in 1805…(Middleton 1994): 14 .”
[43] Ibid.
[44] Ibid., p. 16.
[45] Sir John Soane, Crude hints towards an history of my house in L. I. Fields (London, 1812): 13.
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George Dodds | University of Tennessee
[46] See (Middleton 1994): 15.
[47] Soane, op. cit., p. 21.
[48] Phillipe Junod explains: “The artificial ruins that multiplied in the gardens of the time are already “anticipated”
ruins because the quality of becoming old was given to them from the beginning. …Although the fake ruin ap-
peared as a typical phenomenon of the time, we do have older examples, such as the ruined bridge of Palazzo
Barberini by Bernini (1629-1632), which had been preceded by the bizarre inventions of Bomarzo, or, if one
believes the Vita di Girolama Genga by Vasari, even of Pesaro. But from the fake ruin to the future ruin there is a
step, and Hubert Robert is almost the first to take it.… At the Salon of 1796, Hubert Robert exhibited two paint-
ings that eventually became famous. The first one was the project of the Great Gallery of the Louvre. This vision
described a future stage of the gallery [as a ruin]…. Robert’s architectural inventions were à l’antique and at the
same time asserted the precariousness of a present meant to become past in the future (Junod 1984, 55).” Also
see Michel Baridon, “Ruins as Mental Construct,” Journal of Garden History, 5 (1985): 84-96.
[49] Pitzhanger Manor was Soane’s country seat from 1800-10. He sold it upon realizing that his sons were not
going to pursue an architectural career. Many of the objects and paintings at the Soane Museum were originally
bought and installed specifically for Pitzhanger Manor. See (Soane 1981, 63). The topic of Soane’s work in
relation to the image and idea of the ruin was the subject of the exhibition, “Soane and the Ruin” at the John
Soane’s Museum in London, in 1999. See (Musson 1999, 92-93).
[50] Leon Battista Alberti warns that the architect must build in accordance with nature, for buildings are made
from the matter of the earth and nature is always at work to take back what is rightfully hers. “First, nothing
should be attempted that lies beyond human capacity, nor anything undertaken that might immediately come
into conflict with Nature. For so great is Nature’s strength that, although on occasion some huge obstacle may
obstruct her, or some barrier divert her, she will always overcome and destroy any opposition or impediment; and
any stubbornness, as it were, displayed against her, will eventually be overthrown and destroyed by her continual
and persistent onslaught (Alberti II:2)”
[51] Middleton, 1994, passim.
[52] Cited in (Middleton 1994):15.
[53] “There is …no advantage in standing and examining a symmetrical garden or building from a point on its
central axis, but since a fixed viewpoint was the basis of the picturesque landscape, in the sense that it was de-
signed to look like a picture when seen from the mansion it surrounded, this was something which those hostile
to the traditional Classical garden refused to accept. Deliberately ignoring the fact that a walk round a formal
garden also furnished a sequence of asymmetrical images (even though these were all related by the mind to
the unity of an axial grid) they insisted that the only conceivable kind of garden was a series of picturesque views
composed like a painting by Salvator Rosa or Nicholas Poussin. The confusion created by these conflicting
doctrines is well exemplified in Payne Knight’s Analytical Enquiry into the Principles of Taste. On page 197 of
the 1805 edition, [the same edition owned by Soane] he puts forward the traditional notion that the regular con-
formation of animals is perceived rather by the mind than the eye, for as he correctly observes there is no object
composed of parts, either in nature or art, that can appear regular to the eye unless seen at right angles, and
this, he says, is the point of sight which a painter of any taste always studiously avoids. But fifteen pages further
on, he deplores symmetrical country houses on the grounds that the beauties of symmetry are only perceived
when the building is shown ‘from a point of sight at right angles with one of the fronts;’ hence for this reason he
now recommends asymmetry as being the only way in which buildings will correspond with the natural environ-
ment of mountains, lawns and woods (Collins 1998, 56).”
[54] There are, in fact, two distinct aspects to Schinkel’s work as landscape designer. One, is more related to
his work as a painter of landscapes, both as canvas art and as large panoramas that were popular during the
early 19th century. He produced a number of these panoramas, largely to support himself and his family during
a period during which architectural commissions were scarce. It is his more mature work that is of concern here
(Bergdoll 1994, 24-26. Schinkel was also an accomplished landscape painter and continued to paint throughout
his career (Börsch-Supan 1991, 9-15)
[55] Bergdoll continues: [The villa’s] two interlocking volumes are in turn set within another rectangular perim-
eter, almost like a series of Chinese boxes. This larger perimeter is created by two external stairs, which give
access to the pergola in front of the studies, commanding a view of the river, and by a low garden enclosure. The
order of the house is thereby interlocked with that of its site on both the land and river sides. (Bergdoll 1994, 114)
[56] See Viollet-le-Duc, Eugène-Emmanuel, Le massif du Mont Blanc; étude sur sa constitution géodésique et
géologique sur ses transformations et sur l’état ancien et moderne de ses glaciers (Paris: J. Baudry, 1876). Sir
John Summerson said of Viollet-le-Duc that he and Alberti were the only “two supremely eminent theorists in
the history of European architecture.” See John Summerson, “Viollet-le-Duc and the Rationalist Point of View,”
in Heavenly Mansions and other essays on Architecture (New York: Norton, 1963): 135.
[57] Collins explains: “Viollet-le-Duc, like Ruskin before him, drew attention to the way mediaeval sculptors had
studied the morphology of vegetation, and how they understood that the contours of plant ‘always express a
function, or submit themselves to the necessities of the organisms’ (Collin 1998 155).”
[58] See (Collins, 1998, 149-184). Collins’s “gastronomic analogy” is discussed later, in Chapter VI in relation to
the Italian term for landscape, paesaggio.
[59] In the present century the biological analogy has been associated primarily with Frank Lloyd Wright, into
whose young hands Sullivan enthusiastically transmitted his copy of Spencer’s biological works. What Wright
has meant by ‘Organic Architecture’ has not always been clear…. But primarily it meant for him a living archi-
tecture; an architecture in which useless forms were sloughed off as part of the process of a nation’s growth,
and in which every composition, every element and every detail was deliberately shaped for the job it had to

perform. With this interpretation no one can take exception, and perhaps the safest thing to say of the Biological
Analogy is that it is simply a more poetic expression of Perret’s idea of L’Architecture Vivante. (Collins 1998, 156)
[60] In Survival through Design, begins by striking a moralistic tone that pervades his book. Invoking the biblical
apocalypse of Sodom and Gomorrah, the stench of which the reader is meant to faintly smell, Neutra explains:
“Organically oriented design could, we hope, combat the chance character of the surrounding scene. Physiol-
ogy must direct and check the technical advance in constructed environment.” In a quasi-scientistic polemical
mode Neutra spends a remarkable amount of time discusses such topics as human fecal matter and its impact
on design. See Richard Neutra, Survival Through Design (New York: Oxford University Press, 1954).
[61] Richard Bullene comments, “The suspension was largely due to war time logistics and interest, rather
than any conflict with the [Italian Fascist] regime. Ponti was not a person to passionately support or oppose
any political position, and this left him with the image of a collaborator. In 1946 [Ponti] was ready to resume
publication of Domus, but his compromised status left him unable to sever as direttore. [Ernesto] Rogers had
contributed through the Anonimo series [a series of articles published under a pseudonym]. His intellectual and
political credentials made him the attractive candidate for directorship. He held the post for two years, making
the journal a high point in architectural thought (Bullene 1994, 25).” Ponti was the editor of Stile from 1941 to
1947. He became the editor of Domus in 1948. Prior Lisa Licitra Ponti characterized the 2 year period of Roger’s
editorship of, Domus as characterized by, “a tension between neoclassical excellence and the emergence of the
‘new, coming out of another level of thinking.” See Lisa Licitra Ponti, Gio Ponti: The Complete Works 1923-1978,
translated by Huw Evans (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1990): 18.
[62] See (Ponti 1960b,3-8; and 1960c, 9-14).
[63] See “La casa nel deserto di Richard J. Neutra arch.,” Domus 227 (1948): 2-7.
[64] Richard J. Neutra, “Neutra a Venezia,” Domus 233 (1949): 1 Also see Chapter III. Neutra’s Venice lecture
was delivered at the Ca’ Giustinian, that today houses the offices of the Biennale. Ponti’s publication of Neutra’s
architecture and lecture were all calculated to distance the new Domus from Zevi’s Metron and Roger’s previous
editorship of Domus. See Chapter III and Appendix E.
[65] See (Hunt and Willis,1988).
[66] He continues: “[Yet,] we look at a lot, a piece of property, and say it has a view. It has a good exposure, it has
privacy. All this is really figure of speech. What we actually are concerned with are human responses, organic
and social necessities, which can be gratified on or through this site. To us the site is not animated in the early
sense. It no more has a view than it has eyes(Neutra 1951, 12-16).” Neutra continues that if the architect makes
a “fitting floor plan” so that a structure is “fitted … to its setting,” and works “with the grain” of the site, the own-
ers will be able to live in harmony with their site (Neutra 1951, 14-16). Hence, for Neutra, a site can no longer
be thought of as having a “spirit,” or a “face,” but it does have a “grain,” something that is particular to it. This
site force can effect the body and mind of the client, positively or negatively, depending on how the architecture
interacts with these forces. Later, using a kind of zoomorphic analogy, Neutra explains: “The architect who is
sensitive to his site is not content with merely digging a foundation as a means of securing adhesion between the
building and the ground. As a further means of site-anchorage he may send out tentacles of structure to catch
or hook some surrounding feature of the land (Neutra 1951, 41).”
[67] Wright’s designs for Taliesin, Fallingwater and such projects as Willey House (1933-34) – the latter of which
he referred to as “The Garden Wall” – are all examples of his larger vision of the “natural house.” The “Usonian
House” was the prototype that Wright proposed in his book, The Natural House (Wright 1954), a copy of which
Scarpa owned.[67] Levine comments, “The Usonian House …evolved out of the Willey House (Levine 1996,
223).” “The [Willey] house literally depends upon the garden wall as it forms a kind of lean-to recalling the
primordial “northern house” Viollet-le-Duc illustrated in his Habitations of Man in All Ages(Levine 1996, 222).”
[68] This expression was coined by Justice Potter Stewart of the United State Supreme Court. In his majority
opinion in the case of Jacobellis v. Ohio, Stewart explained: “I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds
of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description [hard-core pornography]; and perhaps
I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it.” Supreme Cour t Decision in the Case
of Jacobellis v. Ohio 1964.
[69] Wright re-published his “London Lectures” (1939), in The Future of Architecture. Wright delivered the
London lectures over four consecutive evenings. On the first evening Wright explained: “Architecture already
favors the reflex, the natural easy attitude, the occult symmetry of grace and rhythm affirming the ease, grace,
and naturalness of natural life. Modern architecture -- let us now say organic architecture – is a natural archi-
tecture – the architecture of nature, for nature. To go back now for a moment to the central thought of organic
architecture, it was Lao-tse, five hundred years before Jesus, who, so far as I know, first declared that the reality
of the building consisted not in the four walls and the roof but inhered in the space within, the space to be lived
in. That idea is entire reversal of all pagan – ‘classic’ – ideals of building, classical architecture falls dead to the
ground (Wright 1953, 245).”
[70] Echoing Viollet-le-Duc, Wright argues: “The Gothic cathedrals in the Middle Ages had much in them that was
organic in character, and they became influential and beautiful, insofar as that quality lived in them which was or-
ganic, as did all other architectures possessing it. Greek architecture knew it – not at all (Wright 1953, 258) !”
[71] In his obituary of Zevi, David Sharp expanded on this key period in Zevi’s architectural and political life:
“From the time of his architectural studies at Rome University (1936-39) he was actively opposed to Fascism.
After graduation he traveled to London, where he enrolled as a third year student at the Architectural Associa-
tion while working simultaneously with the Italian anti-Fascist resistance. A year later he joined the anti-Fascist
group Giustizia e Libertà in Paris before moving to the United States, where he led the American Branch in
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George Dodds | University of Tennessee
Boston while pursuing a Master’s degree at Harvard under Walter Gropius. In 1943 he was back in London to
aid the fight for the liberation of Italy making clandestine broadcasts and working as an architect for the US Army
in Europe. His stay was not helped by British Intelligence, who demanded he should desist from broadcasting
but remain as their “house guest” in London. Eisenhower, it appears, had sent a message to London demanding
the end to the Giustizia e Libertà activities as sensitive negotiations were going on with the Italians. He refused
and in 1944 returned to Rome (Sharp 2[72] Ibid.
[73] “La Costituzione dell’Associazione per l’Architettura Organica a Roma,” Metron 2 (September 1945): 75-76.
[74] Yet, little did Zevi realize that the basic parti, as well as many other significant structural aspects of the
garden complex were deeply indebted to Scarpa’s now mature and more understanding of Wright. I discuss
this further below.
[75] “The ‘polemic,’ as the Italians referred to it, carried on from the early summer of 1953 into the early part of
1955. Articles pro and con appeared in daily newspapers and weeklies in every major Italian city. The London
Times and the New York Times also became involved. The professional journals, especially in Italy, devoted
generous amounts of space to the issue. In general, those against the project opposed it on preservationist
grounds. They did not want any building destroyed, since every building, no matter how ‘insignificant,’ was part
of the ‘texture’ of the city. Underlying this reaction was the belief that any modern building would be an intrusion
of a totally hostile character. The Milanese architectural critic and preservationist Antonio Cederna, for instance,
stated that even if Wright were ‘ten thousand times greater than Michelangelo, he must not build on the Grand
Canal…. Today, not even the Eternal Father can build there anymore (Levine 1996, 380-82).’”
[76] The article in Architectural Record was also a reprint, first published in Architectural Record in March
1908. The republication of the article was prompted by the debate of Wright’s proposal for the Guggenheim
Museum.
[77] The now steel-enforced façade was essentially a curtain wall, tied back to the slabs for stability. Franca
Semi, a former student of Scarpa who is responsible for many of the extant audio recordings of Scarpa’s lectures
at the IUAV, collaborated on the project and completed the construction of the building in 1983 (Levine 1996,
382). Also see (Semi, 1983, 180-185). Sadly, the Fondazione Masieri remains today either unused or severely
underutilized as the IUAV seems to have difficulty finding either the funds to support it or a proper use for it. The
public spaces inside are relatively modest although the apartments on the upper floors are ample. Also see
Marco Frascari, “The Pneumatic Bathroom,” Plumbing: Sounding Modern Architecture, Nadir Lahiji and D. S.
Friedman, editors (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1997): 162-180.
[78] These project include the conversion of the convent in Treviso, the “Casa Borgo,” (See Appendix G) and “La
Foresteria” for the Fondazione Querini-Stampalia.
[79] Scarpa had met Wright in 1951 when Wright was in Italy for the opening of the exhibition of his work at the
Palazzo Strozzi in Florence, “Sixty Years of Living Architecture.” When Scarpa finally had the opportunity to meet
his absentee mentor he was apoplectic in his concern to please the master. It was 1951, during Wright’s trip to
Italy for the Palazzo Strozzi exhibition. Finally deciding, after great deliberation, on what kind of flowers to give
to Wright when he greeted him, Scarpa was horrified to find Wright repulsed by the plastic in which the flowers
were wrapped. Perhaps Scarpa’s most difficult moment with Wright occurred during a trip to the Island of Tor-
cello. While there they visited the cathedral together and then dined in what is now the Cipriani trattoria During
the dinner conversation Scarpa happened to mention that the original bridges in Venice did not have guard rails,
as these were added in the 18th and 19th-centuries. There were (and still are) only two surviving bridges without
rails – one of which was on the island of Torcello. Wright insisted on seeing the bridge. It was clear that Wright
was in his cups so Scarpa resisted. Wright, who perceived that Scarpa thought him too feeble and intoxicated,
demanded to see the bridge that is only a short distance from the trattoria. Upon reaching the bridge, Wright
left behind his cane, his cape, and an extremely nervous Scarpa as he hopped across the bridge on one foot
(Sergio Los interview, May 1997).
[80] Margo Stipe, FLWA, Interview, via internet, March 2000.
[81] Margo Stipe, FLWA, Interview, via internet, March 2000. Oscar Stonorov, Louis Kahn’s partner from 1942-
49, designed the exhibition. The exhibit, which included more than 800 drawings and 20 models first opened in
Philadelphia in recognition of the patronage of the owner of Gimbel’s Department Store (now defunct) who was
the brother of Edgar Kaufmann, the client of Fallingwater. Among the various articles on the Philadelphia exhibit
see Talbot Hamlin, “Frank Lloyd Wright in Philadelphia,” Nation 172 (10 February 1951): 140-41. After the exhibit
closed in Florence, it traveled internationally for 3 more years (Levine 1996, 374).
[82] The Living City was originally published as The Disappearing City (1932).
[83] See (Wright 1958, 112).
[84] See (Wright, 1932, 47).
[85] Rather than Saint Augustine’s City of God, the Garden of Eden (Rykwert 1981), or even such earthly
attempts at paradise as Sabbionetta near Mantua, wherein the ideal city is always limited and protected – en-
closed in a wall –Wright’s idea of Broadacre City was a limitless city without walls.
[86] Whether he took his copy of La città vivente with him on his trip to North America remains unclear at present.
[87] For the relation of C. S. Peirce’s theory of “abduction” in relation to architectural production, see (Frascari
1982) passim.
[88] The L-shaped detail in Wright’s plan is coded with the number 24 indicating that it had been programmed

as a school. Yet, the function assigned the figure would have been of no moment to Scarpa who was constantly
appropriating images or details from one context and using them in an entirely different setting.
[89] The art historian Carlo L. Ragghianti, in his obituary of Olivetti in Zodiac 6, compared Olivetti to Albert
Schweizer, Henry Ford, and Albert Einstein (Ragghianti 1960, 2-3). Perhaps in honor of Adriano Olivetti, one of
the first major retrospective analyses of Scarpa’s work was published in this same issue of Zodiac, in which the
Olivetti Showroom figured prominently (Bettini 1960, 140-187.) Also see in this issue, “Meaning and Building,” in
which Joseph Rykwert cautioned, “eclecticism is much less a danger nowadays than historical determinism. In
its most insidious form, the determinist argument looks something like this: The modern style has arrived at a
stage where monumental buildings provide us with problems which cannot be solved by appealing to functional
criteria. …This line of argument seems to lead to the sad situation where quite unworthy buildings are eloquently
defended if they happen to be vaulted, particularly if the vault has a complex curvature. The reader need only
think of the exaggerated praise which has been lavished on Joern Utzen’s winning competition design for the
new Opera House in Sydney.” See (Rykwert 1960, 193).
[90] There are a number of commonalties between Scarpa’s project for the Olivetti Camp and the Venezuelan
Pavilion in the Biennale gardens that he was designing at the same time. At the Venezuelan pavilion, an overtly
Wrightian work in its details and massing, Scarpa assiduously wove the building amidst the existing trees on the
site. To underscore his desire to connect the building to the garden, both formally and materially, Scarpa used
the Wrightian technique of a series of low stepped terraces. Unlike Wright, Scarpa’s terrace-steps were made
of wood rather than concrete.
[91] Although he often tried, Scarpa was never able to find another apartment in Asolo, due largely to the city’s
popularity with wealthy expatriates, a tradition started by the British in the late-19th century.
[92] See Appendix A.
[93] Aldo Businaro kept a separate apartment on the top floor of his villa for the Scarpas’ use. The vista from the
balcony includes an unobstructed view of Monselice’s Monte Ricco (Businaro interview, April 1997).
[94] Scarpa used a very similar designed for the roof of the Villa Ottolenghi in Bardolino. At the villa Ottolenghi,
one enters from a country road through a simple small gate onto a brick-paved platform from which one can see
views of both the vineyard of the villa and Lake Garda in the distance. It is only after seeing these views and the
planters filled with roses that one notices the stairs, carved out of the body of the form of the villa. They descend
to a narrow calle-like circulation spine. Francesco Dal Co has compared this walkway with the calli of Venice (Dal
Co 1998, 17). Indeed, Scarpa called it a “calletta” which is Venetian for a little calle (Dal Co 1998, 17). Yet, it also
seems intended to provoke associations with other kinds of spaces, such as the Stradissima Valmarana. The
Stradissima Valmarana is a winding walkway, enclosed on both sides by dense vegetation, that connections the
Villa Valmarana and the Villa Rotunda. Scarpa was living in the residence of the stable master, above the old
stables, at the Villa Valmarana at the time he designed the Villa Ottolenghi. The entrance to his home and office
fronts on the Stradissma Valmarana. Scarpa was probably well aware of the pun he was creating by aligning the
“sun” with the “sons.” His knowledge of English was at least good enough to allow him to make this connection.
[95] Businaro would one day like to convert the space into a study center for Scarpa, the core of which would be
his personal library and Scarpa’s drawings for the Palazzetto (Businaro interview, May 1997).
[96] In this case not all of the trees are fruit producing and some of the trees were existing. Scarpa did however,
indicated where he wanted new trees planted in the walled enclosure and the varieties that were to be used
(Aldo Businaro interview, May 1997). I return to the Palazzetto at Monselice later in this chapter.
[97] I am indebted to Marco Frascari and Donald Kunze for helping me to understand the implications of this
etymology.
[98] From Valéry, Scarpa learned not so much how to think, but rather the task of intellect. He learned from
Valéry, as Auden has observed, that the true task of intellect is the mind itself. “The task which Valéry set
for himself was to observe the human mind in the action of thinking; the only mind that he can observe was,
of course, his own.... For this neither a special talent, like a talent for mathematics, nor esoteric learning is
required, but only what might be called intellectual virtue, which is possible for every man to develop, if he
chooses.”[98] Valéry concludes in his retrospective view of his essay on Leonardo, that one’s powers of obser-
vation were inevitably and invariably put to work to construct artifacts, the purpose of which was to excite and
give pleasure to the mind that created them. Within this tautological understanding of the function of intellect
resides the presumption that one’s understanding of the world external to one’s own body and mind is not only
a function of the mind itself, but also a commentary on the mind that mediates between our body and other
bodies. That the task of the mind is to construct things, and through that construction, lead others to speculate
on the construction and the maker of the thing built. Paul Valéry, writing in 1919, commented on his state of
the mind that conceived his earlier, “Introduction a’la methode de Léonardo da Vinci,” a copy of which Scarpa
owned. Valéry remarked that when he was writing the original manuscript in 1894, while he thought he was
commenting on the genius of Leonardo, he now realized after reading Freud’s work on psychoanalysis that it
was only the reflection of his own mind he saw in the image Leonardo – an image that he constructed. That the
picture he looked at was, in fact, not a picture at all but rather a mirror, revealing incites into not the mind of the
artist of the Renaissance, but his own mind and, by extension, all our minds. “Our personality...is therefore no
more than a secondary psychological divinity that lives in our looking-glass and answers to our name (Valéry
1929, 23).” “But all the time each private life possesses, deep down as a treasure, the fundamental permanence
of consciousness which depends on nothing. [S]o the pure ego, the unique and continuous element in each
being in the world, rediscovering itself and then losing itself again, inhabits our intelligence eternally... (Valéry
1929, 24).” Commenting on the instinctive drive to project oneself onto the image of the world one constructs,
Valéry concludes, “In the end -- I confess -- I found nothing better to do than to attribute my own agitation to the
unfortunate Leonardo, transmitting the disorder of my mind to the complexity of his. I attributed all my desires
to him as things he had known. I postulated as things that he had encountered and resolved, many difficulties
74
George Dodds | University of Tennessee
which haunted me in those days. I substituted his supposed power for my own weakness. I dared to discuss
myself using his name and his character (Valéry 1929, 27).”
[99] See (Grassi 1955, 70-78; Soroka, 1989).
[100] This includes the wide scope of Viennese design and the Wiener Werkstäte in general
[101] Detti and Scarpa collaborated on a number of projects that have yet to be fully studied. Included among
these is the Hotel Minerva in Florence, an important part of which is a central enclosed garden designed by
Scarpa. See Appendix A for projects executed with Detti. Many of these are conflated under a single heading
in the Polano catalogue.
[102] This is not necessarily limited to California-based architects. Among those architects included in Zevi’s
chapter, “Il movimento organico negli Stati Uniti,” who are not often included in contemporary discourse are:
Harwell Hamilton Harris, Raymond Viner Hall, William Hamby, Oscar Stonorov, William Wilson Wurster, Albert
Henry Hill, John Ekin Dinwiddle, Gardner A. Dailey, Frederick L. Langhorst, Francis Joseph McCarthy, Robert
Royston, Francis Violich, and Edward Williams (Zevi 1950a, 496). For a recent review of the work of Wurster,
see (Trieb 1995).
[103] Also deserving more thorough study is Scarpa’s relation to the Liberty and neo-Liberty movements in
Italy. See (Banham 1959)
[104] The Associated Press wire service reported, “Zevi died after a coughing attack brought on by the flu, Italian
media reported.” Associated Press, January 9, 2000, Sunday.
[105] When I inquired about some of the plant and tree arrangements at the Palazzetto, the owner Aldo Businaro
laughed and said that the professor did not know very much about such matters. Yet, the plantings I was ask-
ing about is row of poplars that align the outside wall of the enclave adjoining the “scarpaque.” This is the point
at which Scarpa designed a low concrete shelf and window in the wall with a steel screen door that operated
much in the fashion of the glass door at the Brion sanctuary. The poplars form a “jube” which are common to
Arabian landscape and garden architecture. Elizabeth B. Moynihan explains: “Jubes, calledaryks in central Asia
and juis in Afghanistan, form the common method of watering trees in those areas today.” See (Moynihan 1979,
27). Moreover, they typically use poplars because they grow so fast and the need for irrigation is so great. Aldo
Businaro seemed to think that the trees were so closely planted because Scarpa did not know any better, think-
ing he should probably thin them out. (Businaro interview, May 1997).
[106] Other botanical gardens of note in the area at the 16th-century island villa Isola Bella and Isola Madre. I
am indebted to Joanna Dougherty for her assistance in acquiring this information.
[107] Entire books have been devoted to the entrance to the IUAV, Museo di Castelvecchio in Verona, the
Fondazione Querini-Stampalia, the Palazzo Abatellis, the Banca Popolare di Verona, the Banca Popolare di
Gemona, the project for renovation of Santa Caterina (Treviso), the Villa Palazzetto and the Villa Ottolenghi.
[108] Texts by or regarding surrealist artists and writers are well represented in Scarpa’s library, including Bret-
on’s, First Manifesto of Surrealism.
[109] “Io ho una grande passione per l’opera d’arte. Mi sono sempre curato di conoscere, di sapere, no -- di ca-
pire -- e mi pare di avere anche una conoscenza critica notevole. Personalmente, non saprei scrivere, non potrei
fare il critico, ma sento vivamente questi valori -- e allora mi emozionano (Scarpa 1972).”
[110] See (Very 1979, 52).
[111] Following Collins’s lead, Marco Frascari became the first architectural theorist since Fergusson to attempt
to explore this analogy. See Marco Frascari, “An appreciation of architecture from the standpoint of taste and
tactility,” Journal of Architectural Education v.40, no.1 (1986 Fall): 2-7.
[112] It was later, during the design of the Brion project, that Scarpa declined the project for a cemetery in
Modena because the program called for a traditional Italian cemetery, which Scarpa detested. He believed in
the more pastoral, picturesque model such as the Jens Jensen cemetery in Chicago, which he had visited when
in the United States. Scarpa went there to see the tomb of Louis Sullivan. Ultimately, the Modena cemetery
became one of Aldo Rossi’s most important commissions, where he employed some of the formal strategies of
Boullée, but not to the degree where landscape and architecture ever seemed to meld into one vision. Rossi
assiduously maintained the object-quality of his buildings throughout his practice.
[113] I am thankful to Professor Marco Frascari who provided information about the manner in which Rossi’s
translation was incorporated into Italian architectural culture.
[114] Perhaps the first serious work on Boullée, certainly in the twentieth century, is by Emil Kaufmann. See,
“Etienne-Louis Boullée,” Art Bulletin 21 (1939):212-227. More recently, oversights continue. Robin Middleton, in
his introduction to the 1992 translation of Le Camus’, The Genius of Architecture.... refers to Boullée’s essay as
having been published for the first time in 1968, strangely omitting Helen Rosenau’s French language London
edition in 1953 and Aldo Rossi’s Italian translation of the Essai published in Padova in 1967. Middleton cites
Jean-Marie Pérouse de Montclos’ edition of 1968 and the first complete publication of the essay. See Le Camus
de Mézières, Ibid., p. 62. Indeed, the Montclos edition seems to be the third publication of the essai . See (Boul-
lée 1967). For an English translation of Rossi’s introduction see (Rossi 1989, 40-49).
[115] See Donald Kunze, Polythetics: A New Approach to Art, Architecture, and the Geography of Place (http://
wgn111.ce.psu.edu/polythetics/default.html).