https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8828-6714
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Abstract
Studying, teaching and working with Carlo Scarpa (1906–1978) provided the remarkable architect and scholar Marco Frascari (1945–2013) with a unique opportunity to later write about and reveal his insights – of which there are many – into Scarpa’s world of drawing and imagining buildings. With reference to a selection of Frascari’s texts, this essay reexamines two drawings Scarpa made of the bridge between the Reggia and the Mastio tower as part of his remodeling of the Castelvecchio Museum in Verona. Frascari brings to light and situates Scarpa’s imaginative drawing practices in relation to the theater, particularly the memory theater of another former resident of Venice, Giulio Camillo (ca. 1480–1544).
Notes
1. Marco Frascari, “The Body and Architecture in the Drawings of Carlo Scarpa,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 14 (Autumn 1987): 123–42.
2. Marco Frascari, “A Heroic and Admirable Machine: The Theater of the Architecture of Carlo Scarpa, Architetto Veneto,” Poetics Today 10, 1 (Spring 1989): 103–26.
3. Marco Frascari, Monsters of Architecture: Anthropomorphism in Architectural Theory (Savage, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 1991).
4. Ibid., dust jacket.
5. Marco Frascari, “A Tradition of Architectural Figures: A Search for Vita Beata,” in Body and Building: Essays on the Changing Relation between Body and Architecture, edited by George Dodds and Robert Tavernor (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 258–67.
6. Marco Frascari, “Architects Never Eat Your Maccheroni Without a Proper Sauce: A Macaronic Meditation on the Anti-Cartesian Nature of Architectural Imagination,” Nordic Journal of Architectural Research 2 (2003): 41–54.
7. Marco Frascari, “Carlo Scarpa in Magna Graecia,” AA Files 9 (1985): 3–9.
8. Ibid., 3.
9. Frascari, Monsters of Architecture, 5.
10. Ibid., 123 (endnote 6).
11. If you are interested in taking this excursion I highly recommend the seminal essay by Alberto Pérez-Gómez, “Chora: The Space of Architectural Representation” in Chora 1: Intervals in the Philosophy of Architecture, edited by. Alberto Pérez-Gómez and Stephen Parcell (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 1994), 1–34.
12. Sam Ridgway, “A Theater of Architectural Monsters,” in Ceilings and Dreams: The Architecture of Levity, edited by Paul Emmons, Federica Goffi and Jodi La Coe (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2020), 212–21.
13. Vitruvius, The Ten Books on Architecture, translated by Morris Hickey Morgan (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1960), 73.
14. Ibid., 73.
15. Marco Frascari, Eleven Exercises in the Art of Architectural Drawing: Slow Food for the Architect’s Imagination (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2011), 84.
16. Vitruvius, The Ten Books on Architecture, 146.
17. Ibid., 151.
18. Pérez-Gómez, “Chora: The Space of Architectural Representation,” 14.
19. Frascari, Monsters of Architecture, 4.
20. Frascari, “A Tradition of Architectural Figures,” 260. Frascari describes Valeriano Pastor as “a practicing architect in the Veneto and a professor at the Istituto Universitario di Architettura di Venezia (IUAV) who had been a student of Scarpa. He also collaborated with Scarpa on a wide range of projects during a twenty-year period.” Frascari elaborates on Pastor’s career in endnote 11.
21. Frascari, “A Heroic and Admirable Machine,” 114.
22. Frascari, Monsters of Architecture, XI.
23. Frascari, “A Tradition of Architectural Figures,” 264.
24. Ibid., 265.
25. Frascari, “The Body and Architecture in the Drawings of Carlo Scarpa,” 131.
26. Agnosia is the “loss or diminution of the ability to recognize familiar objects or stimuli usually as a result of brain damage.” Miriam Webster online dictionary, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/agnosia (accessed May 7, 2020).
27. Frascari, “Carlo Scarpa in Magna Graecia,” 4.
28. For a delightful and detailed account of Camillo’s memory theatre in the context of a history of mnemonic techniques and devices since classical times, see: Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memory (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966).
29. Frascari, Monsters of Architecture, 25.
30. Ibid., 26.
31. Ibid.
32. Ibid., 25.
33. Marco Frascari, “A Secret Semiotic Skiagraphy: The Corporal Theater of Meanings in Vincenzo Scamozzi’s Idea of Architecture,” Via 11 (1990): 41.
34. Frascari, “A Secret Semiotic Skiagraphy,” 41.
35. Frascari, “Carlo Scarpa in Magna Graecia,” 4.
36. Ibid., 4.
37. Ibid.
38. Ibid.
39. Frascari, Monsters of Architecture, 25.
40. Ibid., 5.
41. A number of these are reproduced in Richard Murphy’s book along with the author’s explanatory diagrams: Richard Murphy, Carlo Scarpa and the Castelvecchio Revisited (Edinburgh: Breakfast Mission Publishing, 2007), 274–85.
42. Frascari, “The Body and Architecture in the Drawings of Carlo Scarpa,” 127.
43. Frascari, “A Heroic and Admirable Machine,” 115.
44. Ibid., 115.
45. Ibid., 124.
46. Ibid.
47. Ibid., 114
48. Frascari, “Architects Never Eat Your Maccheroni Without a Proper Sauce,” 47.
49. Ibid., 47.
50. Ibid.
51. Ibid.
52. Ibid.
53. Ibid.
54. Alberto Pérez-Gómez, “The Architecture of Richard Henriquez: A Praxis of Personal Memory,” in Richard Henriquez: Memory Theatre, edited by Howard Shubert (Montreal, Quebec: Canadian Centre for Architecture and Vancouver Art Gallery, 1993), 9–29.
55. Frascari, “A Heroic and Admirable Machine,” 116.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Sam Ridgway
Sam Ridgway is an architect and Associate Professor in the School of Architecture and Built Environment at the University of Adelaide. He has a Master of Architecture from the University of Adelaide and a PhD from the University of Sydney. His research and publications have focused on a theorization of factory-made buildings, construction theory, architectural representation, and the texts and buildings of the remarkable architect and academic Marco Frascari. Ridgway’s recent work explores the theater, architecture and imagination.