Taken from my sketch book, October 12, 2006

A few thoughts on Scarpa:

In museums, Scarpa has a profound respect for objects of art, elevating them to new realities of their own. The detail displays the work in an almost surreal separation from their context.

estrangement

liberation, free to new interpretation

From “Carlo Scarpa and Italian Architecture” by Manfredo Tafuri
“What seemed no more than an array of fragments turns out to be a landscape from which references emerge to a complex interplay of recognition and recomposition, a network of possible routes.”

In Scarpa’s work are the “fragments” actually “figures?” Figures imply characters and characters carry a dialog and act out a story.

A few thoughts on the “Poetics of Space” by Bachelard

“We are never real historians, but always near poets.”
“Thus the house is not only experienced from day to day only, on the thread of a narrative, or in the telling of our own story. Through dreams, the various dwelling-places in out lives co-penetrate and retain the treasures of former days.”
This relates back to the idea of the “story,” the semi-fictional narrative written by the play between personal memory and the memory imbedded in place.

“The house shelters daydreaming.”
But should the house not also facilitate dreaming? It is through the interaction with the architecture that relevance is given to our memories. It is the memory of sensation that confirms the reality of past experience.

Also, returning to Bachelard’s tie between dreaming and dwelling, implicitly to make architecture is to dream, thus Scarpa’s “vigil.” (explained below)

Vigil: a watch in the night

Dream: a subconscious watch in the night

(“His drawings were the outcome of vigil rather than easy depictions of a decision.” From The Architecture of Carlo Scarpa by Francesco Dal Co)