Carlo Scarpa and Japan The influence of Japanese art and architecture in the work of Carlo Scarpa

Mark Cannata MA, RIBA, AABC

Introduction On the 28 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 20 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... The real purpose of Carlo Scarpas last journey to Japan, and why was he was so far from traditional places of interest, remains a mystery. But its possible he was following the itinerary of a journey undertaken in the 16 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. Haykus small details are, like William Blakes grains of sand, eternities. Bashos 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 Scarpas 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 Scarpas work. It is somewhat remarkable now that during the 1980s 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. Scarpas 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 WabiSabi.
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Carlo Scarpas life Carlo Scarpa was born in Venice in 1906. He spent his youth in Vicenza amongst some of Palladios 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 Scarpas architectural masterpieces - notably, the museum of Castelvecchio in Verona, and the Palazzo Abatellis in Palermo. He won prizes, designed international exhibitions, visited Wrights 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 Scarpas 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 19 century, an influx of Japanese products had created a vogue called Japonisme, partly fuelled by a heightened awareness of aesthetics and decorative design. Japonismes 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 folkart. 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. We see this clearly in the work of Joseph Hoffmann and Frank Lloyd Wright, Scarpas early Gods. Charles Rennie Mackintoshs influence on Hoffman was significant, too, taking the latter from the curvilinear towards angular austerity, double structures, and a 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.
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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 17 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. 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. 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 the interior of the tea house and the interior of the inner person. The Sukiya style, was codified in the 16 century by the great tea master Sen no Rikyu, Kobori Enshus 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. Its 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.
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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 Scarpas architecture - an existential loneliness and tender sadness. Wabi-Sabi also infers that beauty is a dynamic event that occurs between the subject and the object. The initial inspirations for Wabi-Sabis 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 individual existence, all the worlds phenomena are subject to change. 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. These ideas greatly influenced the development of Carlo Scarpas architecture, where fragments imply potential, not finality. This principle informs in particular Scarpas 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. 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. Its 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 Scarpas life. He spent over forty years in Venice, absorbing, according to Manfredo Tafuri: the citys 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. Scarpas 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 surreality11. 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. 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. 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. Scarpas 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.

Memory and anticipation Scarpas exhibition designs clearly explored Japanese ideas. He dramatised the dialogue 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 subjects perception. Scarpas 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 15 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 Scarpas 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. 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 20 Century architecture.
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His first step was a series of demolitions of part of the 19 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 Scarpas 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 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. Scarpas allusion to the iconography of Japanese architecture manifests itself very clearly, the asymmetrical composition brought out the points of friction, encounter and conflict.

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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. Its 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 Scarpas work. The entire vocabulary of Scarpas 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. Scarpas Japonisme instinctively reinterprets derivation. Scarpas details are generally bipartite in design, and this notion of duality is always present in Scarpas 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 Vicos 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. Scarpas restructuring of the Querini Stampalia Foundation is an essay on Venices 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 Scarpas deep understanding of 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.

Scarpas 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 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 dAltivole, 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. 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 Klees 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. 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 Klees painting, one must choose ones 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 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 binocularlike detail, a pair of interlocking circles. This symbol, the vesica piscis is a leitmotiv in Scarpas 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 Scarpas 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, Scarpas 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 ones 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.