The acclaimed survey of the life and works of the celebrated Italian modernist master, available again in a classic format The work of Carlo Scarpa challenged, and continues to challenge, accepted notions of modern architecture. While several books have been published on his work, none has approached the breadth and depth of this monograph by Robert McCarter, who is celebrated for his meticulously researched, experientially based, and jargon-free accounts of key figures in modern architecture. This book is the definitive study of Scarpa's many accomplishments, including such works at the Canova Museum, the Castelvecchio Museum, and the Brion Cemetery, among others.
Between 1953 and 1978 the Italian architect Carlo Scarpa produced an incredibly varied range of works that challenge our notions of what modern architecture might be. Foremost in that work was the need to reconcile a wholehearted embrace of the new with the longstanding traditions of local craft and of universal practice to create an architecture that would clearly express its own machine-driven times without abandoning the psychic and sensual forces of place, materiality, and memory. Carlo Scarpa, Architect: Intervening with History illustrates, through abundant reproductions of Scarpa's drawings, the ways the architect created a dialogue with light, space, and architecture within the historic fabric of Italian cities. Presenting these projects as they exist today, the patient eye of contemporary photographer Guido Guidi deepens our understanding of this timely approach to architectural dialogue.
A tribute to a great master of postwar Italian architecture, through a photographic journey with high visual impact. Carlo Scarpa was one of the great masters of postwar Italian architecture. This book proposes a photographic itinerary that unfurls through Venice, Treviso, Verona and Bologna, before reaching the Dolomites, His most significant projects have been photographed specifically for the book, including constructions and installations in public spaces, such as museums, shops and offices. Each example illustrates Scarpa's ability to approach the architectural volume as a whole while at the same time tending to its interior layout down to the smallest details, exploring the potential of the material, giving rhythm to the volumes through light, and expressing the poetics of the shape, even in its simplest lines. The projects featured in the book alternate between overviews and close-ups, with a very high photographic quality. They are all briefly introduced by a text that describes their genesis, explains the context in which they were made and focuses on the details that best represent Scarpa's style, with a summary and clear key to understanding the architect's work. The volume ends with a postscript by his son, Tobia Scarpa, who is currently designing the forthcoming Scarpa Museum in Treviso.
Jean-Jacques Lequeu does in fact hide behind the most enigmatic and controversial smile in the history of art, writes Philippe Duboy in a book that is one of the most tantalizing examples of architectural investigation ever produced. It is an extraordinary compilation - part speculative biography, part meticulous research, with hundreds of intriguing drawings, many in color - that unravels the mystery of this eighteenth-century maverick artist whose drawings have established him variously as a visionary architect associated with Boullee and Ledoux, forerunner of surrealism, and inventor of bad taste. Lequeu's architectural drawings from the legendary portfolios Architecture civile and Nouvelle methode are presented here in their entirety, along with his Lewd Figures, perhaps the oddest feature of the whole collection. The drawings are accompanied by long captions, misspelt and ungrammatical, but written in a flawless bureaucratic hand. The artist's marginalia provide insights into his visions, which seem dominated by an obsession with petrified forms and a recurring preoccupation with sex. Interleaved with the drawings are curious autobiographical papers. And it is here that Duboy's investigation of Lequeu begins to reveal strange clues. He discovers that Lequeu was not an architect at all but a government bureaucrat, a draftsman who ended up living in a brothel. Between the brothel and the obscure office from which he was eventually fired, he produced his encyclopedia of the universe - bizarre portraits of nuns baring their breasts and other lewd figures, and architectural fantasies of vast imaginary cities. Duboy takes his study further, into the realm of Charles Fourier andhis brother-in-law Anthelme Brillat-Savarin and from there to the world of the dadaists, surrealists, and futurists, particularly the circles of Marcel Duchamp and Le Corbusier. He suggests that Duchamp and Raymond Rousell tampered with the Lequeu drawings to concoct a character and oeuvre even more puzzling. There are glimpses of Duchamp's convolutions of mind that will stir a reassessment of his work. Duchamp emerges here, for the first time, as an intrepid and unwavering despiser of Le Corbusier. Twentieth-century reputations are as much at stake in this study as those of the eighteenth-century artist, notes Robin Middleton. Philippe Duboy is Professor of the History of Cities, Paris-Belleville School of Architecture.
A greatly expanded version of the author's 1990 work, this book not only analyzes Scarpa's personal language of architecture but also sequences his drawings, revealing the complex history of the Castelvecchio Museum in Verona.
The Castelvecchio in Verona, renovated between 1958 & 1964 as a museum is the best known project of the Italian architect Carlo Scarpa (1906-1978). The author, Richard Murphy, traces the initial ideas as represented by Scarpa's beautiful yet incisive sketches, through the various stages of work to building completion. Numerous drawings by Scarpa, many illustrated in colour, are supplemented by Murphy's own superb measured line drawings, which accurately show the full realisation of Scarpa's building as it stands today.
Carlo Scarpa was a virtuoso of light, a master of detail, and a connoisseur of materials. Today he is known as a 20th-century master of architecture. To mark the first centenary of Scarpa's birth, all his works are presented here for the first time. The 250 illustrations cover all 58 of his structures, including the Castelvecchio Museum (Verona), the Olivetti showroom (Venice), and the Brion Tomb in San Vito d'Altivole (Treviso), as well as his important glass designs. The book includes essays by leading architects and architecture critics, offering an extensive overview of Scarpa's life as well as interpretations of his architecture. Known as the "Frank Lloyd Wright of Italy," Scarpa's decorative style has become a model for architects wishing to revive craft and luscious materials in the contemporary manner.
