Carlo Scarpa and Japan

The influence of Japanese art and architecture

in the work of Carlo Scarpa

Mark Cannata
MA, RIBA, AABC
m.cannata@mcaslan.co.uk

Biography

Copyright reverts to the author

The Role of the Humanities in Design Creativity International Conference 2007
Mark Cannata grew up in Italy, where he studied Architectural Engineering at the
Universita’ degli Studi di Catania, before returning to the UK to study Architecture at
Leeds Metropolitan University and the Architectural Association. He currently leads the
Historic Buildings Unit at John McAslan + Partners, responsible for the transformation of
buildings such as Mendelsohn’s and Chermayeff’s De La Warr Pavilion, Charles Rennie
Mackintosh’s 78 Derngate, James Stirling’s History Faculty in Cambridge, the
Roundhouse in Camden and, most recently, the renovation of King’s Cross Station in
London.

Introduction

On the 28th of November 1978, Carlo Scarpa died in Sendai in the north of Japan,
following an accidental fall from a staircase. So ended the creative life of one of the
Masters of 20th century architecture.

“If there was an elegant way to die, it was his: he died in Japan, in the land he
had loved most, after Veneto where he first saw the light. He was wrapped in a
great kimono, an honour the people of that far-off land reserve for their
greatest sons and laid in a wooden box, a bed, a cradle, as the poet Ungaretti
called it - not a coffin - sealed with flowing white ribbons. For five years there
was only earth over his body...” 1

The real purpose of Carlo Scarpa’s last journey to Japan, and why was he was so far from
traditional places of interest, remains a mystery. But it’s possible he was following the
itinerary of a journey undertaken in the 16th century by the great Japanese Haiku poet
Basho. Haiku is a cursory, allusive poetry linked to Taoist symbolism and Zen-Buddhist
paradox. Haiku is contemplative and fragmentary. Hayku’s small details are, like William
Blake’s grains of sand, eternities. Basho’s journey to Hiraizumi was, as he put it, the
Narrow road to the deep north - a vision of both eternity and finality that is a leitmotif in
Scarpa’s work.

Since his death, a great deal has been written on Carlo Scarpa by acclaimed architects and
critics such as Richard Murphy, Francesco Dal Co, Marco Frascari and Kenneth
Frampton, yet each has failed to highlight the importance of Japanese culture in Scarpa’s
work. It is somewhat remarkable now that during the 1980’s very few architects had ever
heard of Carlo Scarpa. How apt that, with the notion of absence as a recurring theme in
his work, that Scarpa should be finally acknowledged as one of the Masters of
contemporary architecture only when he himself is absent.

Scarpa’s work is complex and difficult to interpret. The puzzle lies within the process of
creativity in Scarpa, the questions of what is influencing what? We are compelled to seek
precedents, to establish convergences and affinities. My analysis focuses on references to
traditional Japanese architecture - and in particular the Sukiya style - in the light of the
philosophical concepts of Wabi-Sabi.

Copyright reverts to the author

The Role of the Humanities in Design Creativity International Conference 2007
Carlo Scarpa’s life

Carlo Scarpa was born in Venice in 1906. He spent his youth in Vicenza amongst some
of Palladio’s most celebrated works, and returned to Venice after the death of his mother
in 1919, where he enrolled in the Accademia delle Belle Arti specialising in architectural
design. At the beginning of 1925 Scarpa was given his first professional assignment and
began to work as a designer with the glassmakers of Murano and the following year he
was accredited as professor of design at the Accademia delle Belle Arti and also began
teaching at the Institute of Architecture in Venice.

From 1928, Scarpa organised various exhibitions at the Biennale, and in 1934 many of
his glassworks where exhibited at the Triennale in Milan. In that same year Scarpa was to
meet Josef Hoffmann, who exerted a major influence upon his work as exhibition
designer. A few years later he also met Frank Lloyd Wright for the first time.

The 1950s were the crucible for Scarpa‘s architectural masterpieces - notably, the
museum of Castelvecchio in Verona, and the Palazzo Abatellis in Palermo. He won
prizes, designed international exhibitions, visited Wright’s buildings, met Louis Kahn,
designed the Brion cemetery and the Banca Popolare di Verona, was sued for not being
an ‘Architect’. And he visited Japan for the first time.

Derivation

What, though, were his seminal influences? His early studies at the Accademia delle
Belle Arti of Venice were during the transition from Classicism to Secession. The work
of Otto Wagner, the doyen of the Viennese school, drew Scarpa’s attention to the work of
both Josef Hoffmann and Charles Rennie Mackintosh, whose approach paid particular
attention to tectonics, craftsmanship and material. Scarpa repeatedly mentioned that at the
Accademia, a craft-cum-building site atmosphere prevailed.

In the late 19th century, an influx of Japanese products had created a vogue called
‘Japonisme’, partly fuelled by a heightened awareness of aesthetics and decorative
design. Japonisme’s main contribution, apart from its iconography, was a way of
perceiving and re-expressing nature, man, objects and history; it was a method of
research, as much as an aesthetic model.

The European interest in Japanese art was linked with the avant-garde movements: it
allowed folk-art. It was anti-classical. It suggested a mythical past. It encouraged
historical connection. And these ideas, it has been said, would have as main ornamental
characteristic “…an asymmetrical undulating line and energy laden movement, which
was sometimes rectilinear and sometimes plastic and three dimensional”. 2

We see this clearly in the work of Joseph Hoffmann and Frank Lloyd Wright, Scarpa’s
early Gods. Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s influence on Hoffman was significant, too,
taking the latter from the curvilinear towards angular austerity, double structures, and a
Copyright reverts to the author
The Role of the Humanities in Design Creativity International Conference 2007
strangely expressed gravitas.

For Scarpa, however, the influence was about architectural elements directly derived
from the Japanese. This ultimately produced architecture whose essential and
metaphysical qualities reflected the characteristics of Japanese space and philosophy.

The journey

The journey, within Japanese culture, has always had a symbolic meaning: that of visiting
another world, not knowing what to expect, or whether one would survive. Journey in
Japan can also mean purification or atonement. Journey is a metaphor for impermanence.

Scarpa visited the masterpieces of traditional Japanese architecture of Kyoto, notably the
17th century imperial palace of Katsura with, “…with the calibrated geometries of its
interiors... and the metaphysical spaces of the gardens, in which the various materials
almost sing out their presence”. 3 Its first designer was the legendary architect and tea
master Kobori Enshu, tea ceremony master and architect - one assumes his tradesmen
were never thirsty on the job! - who sought to express his ideals of rustic simplicity and
picturesque nature on a larger scale than what had been attempted before.

Crucially, there is no separation between the building and its immediate surroundings; it
is integrated in one spatial composition. Of the three main component buildings, Ko-
Shoin, Chu-Shoin and Shin-goten, the latter in the more intimate Sukiya style. The
fundamental medium of expression is space. As Teiji Itoh remarks, the Sukiya style
connotes

“ a world of associations with buildings in which the ancient and traditional

fondness for natural materials, simplicity and closeness to nature dominates
every detail of composition.” 4

The concept and detail of humble tea houses was just as significant to Scarpa as Katsura.
The tea house itself is formed by the midsuya, where the tea utensils are washed and
arranged; the machiya, a portico where the guests wait to be received; and the roji the
garden path connecting the machiya to the teahouse. An important feature of a teahouse
is the entrance door for the guests, barely three feet high, signifying humility for those
who enter. Note that the human element is the defining theme, rather than the
architecture.

A profound existential awareness emanates from occupancy of the tea house itself, and
from the ritual of arrival, a journey that brings nature into dialogue with the human
consciousness. Outside the tea house, the zigzagging stepping stones, intended as
separation with the external world, yet also moments of progression. As in Zen doctrine,
everything unnecessary - mental or physical - is left out. There is no difference between
Copyright reverts to the author
The Role of the Humanities in Design Creativity International Conference 2007
the interior of the tea house and the interior of the inner person.

The Sukiya style, was ‘codified’ in the 16th century by the great tea master Sen no Rikyu,
Kobori Enshu’s own teacher, developing the philosophic and aesthetic concept that
brought the style into existence, that of Wabi-Sabi.

To define Wabi-Sabi is not a simple task, as it touches more on feeling than rationality.
Wabi-Sabi can be seen to contain certain aspects of the philosophy of ‘less is more’, that
Ludwig Mies Van der Rohe advocated in modern architecture. But where modernism was
geared towards science and an artificial art, Wabi-Sabi seeks fusion with nature. Wabi-
Sabi savours the beauty of the patina of time on an object, rather than a polished surface;
penumbra, rather than light; organicity and decay rather than mechanicity and perfection.

Wabi and Sabi are two aspects of one reality. Sabi - which means “chill”, “lean”, or
“withered” - refers to individual objects and the environment. Wabi refers to a state of
mind or a way of life. It’s often defined as singularity or emptiness. In aesthetics, Wabi-
Sabi sought open mindedness and feeling for the small, inconspicuous everyday things.
As Leonard Koren puts it:

“…It is a beauty of things imperfect, impermanent and incomplete. It is a

beauty of things modest and humble. It is a beauty of things unconventional.” 5

For Wabi-Sabi, all things are either devolving toward, or evolving from, nothingness.
Wabi-Sabi is about the tension created on the borders of nothingness, between what
appears as destruction, and construction. In metaphysical terms, Wabi-Sabi suggests that
the universe is in constant motion toward, or away from, potential. And the
impermanence of all things confers physical and emotional beauty. Think of Venice.

The tenets of Wabi-Sabi, as defined by Koren, are implicit in Scarpa’s architecture - “an
existential loneliness and tender sadness”. 6 Wabi-Sabi also infers that beauty is a
dynamic event that occurs between the subject and the object.

The initial inspirations for Wabi-Sabi’s metaphysical, spiritual and moral principles can
be found in the three religions of Japan: Shintoism, Taoism and Zen Buddhism.

Shinto reveres the Kami, which are deified nature spirits, and they imply a quest for
purity and simplicity. The Kami lived in darkness, and Shinto shrines embrace this
quality. Movement from light into shadow, and from shadow into darkness, implies
purification. The darkness of tea rooms, and the processional route of purification that the
visitor goes through to reach them is an evolution of this Shinto precept.

In Taoism, according to Lao-Tsu, the void is the essence of everything. As Amos Chang
says:

“The emptiness of void is totally undefined, utterly static, completely

receptive...Concomitant with emptiness is impermanence, where all
Copyright reverts to the author
The Role of the Humanities in Design Creativity International Conference 2007
 individual existence, all the world’s phenomena are subject to change.” 7

These ideas have radically influenced the Japanese concept of space as something
dynamic. The Sukiya style has partly derived from the concept of the void as being
dynamic. According to Taoism, the only way to acquire the positive is to contain
the negative. In Taoism, growth is seen as the essential character of everything that
is alive. This means that anything that is perfected, which cannot grow and change,
is by definition dead.

“To him who regards nothing as persistent,“ as Chang puts it, “ what is
essentially important is the possibility of becoming something, not the
opportunity of remaining something confronting deterioration.” 8

These ideas greatly influenced the development of Carlo Scarpa’s architecture, where
fragments imply potential, not finality. This principle informs in particular Scarpa’s
approach to museum design, in which fragments of works of art are not artificially
completed, but are left to the visitor to complete, dramatising the communication between
object and viewer.

As Kazuko Okakura described in his Book of tea:

“True beauty could be discovered only by one who mentally completed the
incomplete. The validity of art lay in its possibilities for growth. In the tea
room it is left to each guest in imagination to complete the total effect in
relation to himself.” 9

Now we turn to Zen Buddhism, in which truth can be reached only through the
comprehension of opposites. Zen uses meditation as a means to enlightenment, or Satori;
an intuitive, rather than intellectualised, condition. The tea ceremony and the Sukiya style
derive from these principles.

Scarpa realised that space, as for the Japanese, is an experiential rather than measurable
compound. And if space is experiential, it must be sequential, and dependent on empirical
experience - hence its temporal aspect. In architecture, space becomes both layer and
procession. It’s no accident that in Japanese ideograms, time is expressed as “space in
flow”.

Incompleteness, impermanence, asymmetry, sequentiality together with emptiness and

duality are intrinsic to the Japanese notion of space. Which means that, consciously or
otherwise, architectural composition is based on time - and that it is intangible elements,
the negative in architectonic forms, which gives them life.

Venice

And now we must return to Venice, the fundamental text of Scarpa’s life. He spent over
Copyright reverts to the author
The Role of the Humanities in Design Creativity International Conference 2007
forty years in Venice, absorbing, according to Manfredo Tafuri:

“…the city’s perverse dialectic between the celebration of form and the
scattering of its parts, between the will to represent and the evanescence of
the represented, between the research of certainties and the awareness of
relativity….” 10

Scarpa’s ‘Venetianitas’ pervades every aspect of his work. Venice means a certain way of
approaching materials and their transformation, of approaching space - and time.
For Scarpa, Venice is both real and mythical - not simply a collection of monuments and
buildings, but a way of encountering reality. Light, water, decay and renewal, the
coupling of precious and humble materials, are all used by Scarpa to articulate space, the
most precious material of all.

Water, as CW Moore has said, points to “something beyond itself, it acts as a bridge
spanning the gap from physical reality to symbolic surreality” 11 . And Mircea Eliade adds
that “Emersion repeats the cosmogenic act of formal manifestation; immersion is
equivalent to a dissolution of forms. This is why the symbolism of water implies both
death and rebirth.” 12 This continuous tension of being and non-being is what makes the
city come alive. It recalls the Taoist concept of life, and even more so the Wabi-Sabi
concept of beauty. If Wabi-Sabi is about the tension created on the borders of
nothingness between what appears as destruction and construction, Venice is also an
interface between being and non-being.

Because of the weakness of the subsoil and the presence of water, Venetian buildings
were mainly constructed using bricks and enriched by layering the main facades with
imported marbles and mosaics in a combination of the precious and the poor, smoothness
and roughness. These decorations transformed the brick wall surfaces into what Richard
Murphy has described as “brilliant ethereal visions and undulating watery patterns
below”. 13

Precious building materials had to be imported. Even the lion of St.Mark was originally
part of a booty, and only on arrival in Venice was fitted with wings and a book. From
illicit cargo to republican symbol. An architettura di spoglio arriving in a city of
absorption, reinterpretation and, crucially, no possibility of final synthesis. Venice, the
ex-novo creation, the amalgam of peoples and stones from other places, commercially
connected with the Orient.
Scarpa’s work is an expression of this limpid Venetian continuum, which Kenneth
Frampton describes as:

“…a disquisition on time, on the paradoxical durability and fragility of

things; on all but cinematic sensibility, permeated by an ineradicable
melancholy.” 14
Memory and anticipation

Scarpa’s exhibition designs clearly explored Japanese ideas. He dramatised the dialogue
Copyright reverts to the author
The Role of the Humanities in Design Creativity International Conference 2007
between object and subject; the visitor to his exhibitions and museums would always be
engaged in a dialogue with the work of art, a principle at the basis of the Japanese
conception of art as an active process between object and viewer: beauty is as much in
the object as in the subject’s perception.

Scarpa’s way of exhibiting is analogous to the extreme attention to detail that is at the
basis of Japanese aesthetics. Scarpa never tried to ‘recreate’ the work of art through fake
additions or extensions in order to reconstitute the whole. He reinterpreted the object
itself, but left the observer to mentally complete the whole.

In the Palazzo Abatellis, his first major work, begun in 1953-4, his interventions in the
15th century palace are an essay on the problem of re-interpretation. The building showed
signs of various partial alterations and restorations that had taken place after the building
had been bombed in 1943. Rather than covering and unifying the differences, Scarpa re-
affirmed them by linking these disjunctions to the works of art in a sequence of spatial
events.

Ruins, for Scarpa, are not necessarily what remains visible, but rather its negative. That
which is missing, becomes the most engrossing exhibit. And as we know, the concept of
void as something interstitial, constitutes the essence of the doctrine of Tao. Scarpa, a
Venetian, was already intuitively aware of this paradox even before he found
confirmation in Japanese art and architecture.

The character and effect of Scarpa’s architecture resides ultimately in his solution to the
paradox of comprehending the invisible through the visible, of being aware that as Chin-
Yu Chang has noted in his essay on the Japanese concept of space:

“…the immaterial, that which is likely to be overlooked, is the most useful.

But physical void as such is still meaningless to us because although
physically man, an ever-changing being, lives in space, psychologically he
lives along the dimension of time.” 15

In his intervention on the Museum of Castelvecchio in Verona, Scarpa achieved a

delicate balance between the specifics of a historic building and its larger historical
context; the particularities of the exhibits and finally a rigorous understanding of the
needs of the modern museum, unparalleled in 20th Century architecture.

His first step was a series of demolitions of part of the 19th century barracks,
disentangling the various layers of history to disclose the building itself, in the same way
as he had done in the Palazzo Abatellis - as an exhibit in its own right.

Castelvecchio demonstrates how Scarpa’s architecture is based on dialectical issues of

juxtaposition of contrasting elements. There is a dialogue between different materials
from different historical eras, placed together - yet held apart: the layered floors, like
carpets, stop short of the walls, while the walls, in turn, appear disconnected from the
ceilings. The treatment of materials reinforces this juxtaposition: the polished surface of
Copyright reverts to the author
The Role of the Humanities in Design Creativity International Conference 2007
the floors contrasts with the rough, almost casual, treatment of the passages. And the
void, as central compositional element, has a numinous presence.

The treatment of detail is as important as the formal vocabulary. Scarpa’s allusion to the
iconography of Japanese architecture manifests itself very clearly, the asymmetrical
composition brought out the points of friction, encounter and conflict.

The entrance to the museum is not readily visible. One hears the sound of water from
partially hidden fountains. One must then deviate from the straight line towards the
entrance via a path of stone slabs that have the same function and meaning of the roji, the
path of stones that leads to the teahouse. One slows down, focusing on smaller details.
It’s a purification of sorts.

The screen made out of unequal timber panels is used to house a collection of paintings
on the internal face, recalls the timber framed constructions of Katsura and, functionally,
the shoji, the bamboo or fabric screens used under the eaves of Japanese buildings. The
ceiling on the first floor, and the floor treatment at ground floor level, recall the typical
disposition of tatami mats typical of Japanese constructions. This Japanese reference is
further enhanced by the lattice frame vent grill inserted in the ceiling. This lattice form
reappears under various guises in most of Carlo Scarpa’s work.

The entire vocabulary of Scarpa’s celebrated details can be found at Castelvecchio.

Scarpa borrows details from Japan that are instantly recognisable as being Japanese, yet
are used mostly in different functions from their original purpose. Scarpa’s Japonisme
instinctively reinterprets derivation.

Scarpa’s details are generally bipartite in design, and this notion of duality is always
present in Scarpa’s work, either in the form of contrasts between materials or in the
duplication of structure. There are symbolic implications, especially in relation to
Oriental philosophy: the coupling of opposites. Through detail, Scarpa sought to reveal
difference, rather than effacing it - whether using modern materials, or Venetian stucco
lucido, whose colours have incredible depth and dissolution.

Scarpa also believed in Gian Battista Vico’s maxim “Verum ipsum factum” - truth
coincides with the making. The hand of the worker would add a layer of imperfection or
individuality that would make the detail come alive. The heritage of the Secession school
on the Venetian tradition is evident in this. And in Sukiya, of course, architecture and
craft were not seen as separate.

Water was a crucial presence, of course. Scarpa’s restructuring of the Querini Stampalia
Foundation is an essay on Venice’s architecture and water. Water is allowed into the
structure, constantly covering and uncovering the steps at the canal gate, or, in the case of
the acqua alta, entering the building along the channels, becoming a medium between
interior and exterior.

But it is in the garden of the Querini Stampalia that Scarpa’s deep understanding of
Copyright reverts to the author
The Role of the Humanities in Design Creativity International Conference 2007
Japanese architecture reveals itself most poignantly. This has often been compared to
Japanese gardens, especially with the garden of Bosen at Kohoan temple designed by
Kobori Enshu.

Tadashi Yokoyama sees the Querini Stampalia as “framed by the presence of the
water pattern, in a sort of inverted shoji, which at the same time acts as a frame and
a protective device for the lawn. This becomes inviolate, a perfect horizontal
surface to be viewed but not traversed.” 16

Scarpa’s architecture freezes instances of history, ruins perhaps, yet also releases them as
dissertations on the passage of time. Ruins, as Walter Benjamin said,

“…not only signal mortality, they point to a deep belonging to the natural
world, a world that is less our inevitable tomb than our eternal home….In
the ruin history has physically merged into the setting. And in this guise
history does not assume the form of the process of an eternal life as that of
irresistible decay” 17

Thus, new objects emerge out of apparent nothingness, an ambiguity that may generate
metaphor. Consider the Banca Popolare di Verona. Below each of the circular windows
is a vertical line running in the direction of the likely flow rainwater. This is an almost
frozen instance of the action of tempo on the building. What is missing becomes the real
manifestation. We are in the presence of the void.

At the Brion cemetery in S.Vito d’Altivole, Scarpa interrupted the horizontal run of
the stepped parapet with a gap allowing the rainwater to seep through, leaving a dark
stain in the middle of the wall. Scarpa predicts in the detail, the way nature would
‘complete’ his composition, almost controlling the action of weather and guiding it to a
conscious, instinctive, aesthetic intent. At the Brion Cemetery, key images in his memory
resurfaced, turning the Brion into “…the concrete and tangible arrival point of a free
course, of a narrative that follows the unforeseeable thread of the association of ideas.” 18

The overall structure of the Brion recalls a painting by Paul Klee, in particular, the Rich
Port, serves as an immediate portrayal of the change and interchange of human destiny.

“From the rich seaport the steamer appears beyond the crenellations of the
wall which separates us from the Beyond,” as a critic described Klee’s
painting “…for he who finds the path from the Fields of Mourning to the
Pyramid and to the chapel of True Believers, or takes his own path, will
stand before the open space of an eternal future.” 19

The composition of the Brion evokes the atmosphere of an artificial Japanese landscape,
a series of pavilions inserted into a topography without apparent structure. Like the
wanderer in Klee’s painting, one must choose one’s path. To one side, the narrow
passageway between entrance portico is flanked by the water channel - undoubtedly a
Venetian calle. After it, a glass diaphragm plunges into the water, reminiscent of the
Copyright reverts to the author
The Role of the Humanities in Design Creativity International Conference 2007
purification process, leading to the floating pavilion: Venice, one imagines. Across the
field, the arcosolium, which appears at once as an arch and a bridge, under which are the
tombs of his clients, the meditation pavilion and the chapel.

The pavilion of meditation at the Brion is the abstraction of a teahouse, and Scarpa used
timber and copper shoji to frame the view towards the tombs, directing the view through
a bronze binocular-like detail, a pair of interlocking circles. This symbol, the ‘vesica
piscis’ is a leitmotiv in Scarpa’s architecture, a signature ideogram that reappears under
various guises in most of his later projects - an alternative yin-yang symbol. The two
worlds, the two poles of Scarpa’s repository of memory, are joined by the inter-locking
circles, a symbol with a profound significance of unity of opposites.

At the other end of the garden, flanked on three sides by water, is the private chapel,
Scarpa‘s most direct reference to the Japanese teahouse, acting as a counter-balance to
the meditation pavilion; a further, more intimate reinterpretation of the teahouse. This
time the focus is not on nature, on the external environment, but on the world within
ourselves, that of our own spirituality. The chapel appears to be designed as though to
instil an introspective kind of meditation, an awareness of our own mortal condition; a
further disquisition on the inexorable passage of time.

Finally, at the end of one’s wandering (or perhaps at the beginning), a bridge of stepping
stones leads out of the island chapel across the water and back to the material world.

Here, in a corner of the cemetery that was once the spot where dead flowers used to be
thrown away, lies the Venetian master himself.

Copyright reverts to the author

The Role of the Humanities in Design Creativity International Conference 2007
Notes

1
Francesco Dal Co and Giuseppe Mazzariol – 1984, Carlo Scarpa, The complete works, Electa/Rizzoli
2
Various- C.R. Mackintosh, Synthesis in Form, Academy Editions, 1994
3
Francesco Dal Co and Giuseppe Mazzariol- op.cit.
4
Teiji Itoh -The classic tradition of Japanese architecture, Weatherhill/Heibonsha, 1971
5
Leonard Koren- Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers, Stone Bridge Press, 1994
6
Leonard Koren- op.cit.
7
Amos Ih Tiao Chiang – The Tao of Architecture, Princeton University Press,1956
8
Amos Ih Tiao Chiang –op.cit.
9
Kazuko Okakura- The book of Tea, Internet download,www.japcity.org
10
G.Zambonini - 1983, Process and theme in the work of Carlo Scarpa, Perspecta, 20
11
C. W. Moore - Water and Architecture, Thames and Hudson
12
Gaston Bachelard - Water and dreams- an essay on the imagination of matter, The Pegasus Foundation, Dallas, 1983
13
Richard Murphy- Carlo Scarpa and the Castelvecchio, Butterworth Architecture
14
Kenneth Frampton, Studies in tectonic culture, Thames and Hudson
15
Ching-Yu Chang – Japanese spatial conception, The Japan Architect, 1984
16
Tadashi Yokoyama - in Carlo Scarpa, Architecture and Urbanism, Special issue, 1985
17
Walter Benjamin – The origin of German tragic drama, in Michael S. Roth et al., op.cit.
18
Paolo Portoghesi (ed.)- op.cit.
19
Anon. – Fire and water: Obscurities in the late Paul Klee

Copyright reverts to the author

The Role of the Humanities in Design Creativity International Conference 2007