WORKS Water of Venice

Venice is the city that gave birth to Carlo Scarpa. To understand his distinctive architectural vision, we must first understand the spatial character of this city. Narrow canals penetrate every corner of the city, and their waters come into direct contact and intermingle with the city's buildings. A map of Venice is usually divided into three colors, representing the buildings, the exterior spaces such as streets and plazas, and the canals. The presence of the third category of space makes the city far more complex. Dichotomous concepts such as mass and void, inside and outside, and figure and ground do little to help us understand Venice. Walking through the series of small spaces that are feature of Scarpa's buildings is like strolling through the network of streets of this city. His architecture and Venice both have a narrativelike quality and reveal themselves only gradually more importantly, however, both possess something that draws together disparate elements so that those elements are perceived as parts of a whole, even as each retains its own distinctive character. In the case of Venice, that something is the canals; the waters that repeatedly rise and fall with the sea. In the case of this architecture, it is ambience, light and drifting air. About to take a seat at one of a long row of reading desks at an old library in Paris or to slurp noodles in the humid hustle and bustle of Bangkok, we experience virtually the same feeling. Scarpa takes diverse things - items that are centuries old, objects that are worthy of exhibit, and entirely new elements that he has added himself - and, using their powers of mutual attraction, joins them deftly together into a whole.