Carlo Scarpa, Venice
For most of his life, Carlo Scarpa was not legally an architect. He trained at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Venice, graduating in 1926 as a professor of architectural drawing, and never sat the state examination that would have licensed him to practise. He was taken to court for working without it. He went on to become one of the most admired architects of the twentieth century anyway. People still travel to Venice, to Verona, and to a small cemetery in the Veneto countryside to see what he did with concrete, water and light. They tend to come away talking about the joints.
He was born in Venice in 1906 and spent part of his childhood in Vicenza, the city of Palladio. Venice gave him a lifelong preoccupation with the meeting of materials: stone against water, brick against plaster, brass against wood. But before the buildings, there was glass.
In 1926, barely out of the Accademia, Scarpa began working as a consultant to the Murano glassworks of Giacomo Cappellin. In 1932 he moved to Venini, and for the next fifteen years, as its artistic director, he did something that sounds simple and was not. He went back into the island's oldest techniques - many abandoned, half-forgotten, kept alive by habit in a few furnaces - and asked what each might do if treated as a starting point rather than a tradition.
The results came in a long run of series that collectors now name like movements in a symphony. Sommerso, colour submerged within colour. Bollicine, glass filled with a fine mist of tiny bubbles. Corroso, the surface eaten with acid until it looked like weathered stone. Battuto, ground on the wheel into a faceted, hammered skin. Tessuto, fine vertical threads of colour that read like woven cloth. Murrine, slices of patterned glass cane fused into a mosaic and blown into a vessel. And reticello, perhaps the most demanding of all, in which two layers of fine threads twisted in opposite directions are joined so that they cross, trapping a tiny bubble of air at every intersection.
None of these was a surface effect. Each was a construction, built into the glass at the furnace and impossible to add afterwards. That distinction mattered to Scarpa more than almost anything. He was interested in how a thing was made, and in letting the making show.
He left Venini in 1947 and gave the rest of his life to architecture, but the glass never left him. It is there in the way he handled every material. At the Olivetti showroom on Piazza San Marco, completed in 1958, a staircase of pale Aurisina stone appears to hang in the air, its slabs stepping up as though floating, and the floor is laid with small tesserae of coloured glass. At the Fondazione Querini Stampalia, he let the acqua alta into the ground floor on purpose, building channels and steps so that the lagoon could come and go. At Castelvecchio in Verona, which he reworked as a museum from the late 1950s, he set the medieval equestrian statue of Cangrande della Scala high on a concrete cantilever at the junction of old and new, so that the visitor sees it from below, from above and from the side, again and again, while moving through the building.
His last great work was the Brion tomb at San Vito d'Altivole, near Treviso, commissioned by the widow of the founder of the electronics company Brionvega: a garden of concrete, water and grass, with two interlocking circles cut through one wall like a pair of eyes, or a pair of rings. He worked on it from 1969 until his death. In 1978, travelling in Japan, a country whose architecture he had admired all his life, he fell down a flight of concrete stairs in Sendai and did not recover. He is buried at the edge of the Brion complex, in a corner he had designed.
What connects the glass and the buildings is a kind of patience. Scarpa's architecture is famous for its details - a hinge, a step, the place where a handrail meets a wall - each one drawn and redrawn until it was right. His glass is the same. A piece from the Venini years can look almost plain from across a room. Up close, it turns out to have been thought about more carefully than nearly anything else made in its decade.
The finest of that glass now lives in the great design museums, and is rare outside them. Lighting attributed to Scarpa and Venini - often built on the same old techniques he brought back into use - still turns up, occasionally, in Italian houses. When it does, it carries his signature in the only way he would have cared about. In how it was made.
The Leopard's selection of vintage Murano lighting and glass is in store in Moss Vale and online, including this Scarpa for Venini pendant lamp.