gipsoteca del canova, canova plaster cast gallery extension, possagno 1955-57. architect: carlo scarpa 1906-1978 with v. pastor.

view from the south.

to the right is the original, 19th century museum. the rooms of scarpa's extension are articulated almost as individual buildings and follow the the outline of earlier houses on the site, giving us an example of the layered compositions he would later be famous for.

even if this layering is less extreme than in scarpa's final buildings, the elements of his architecture are carefully drawn apart and given their individuality before being assembled. the windows are the obvious example here, most are highly original takes on the modernist corner window, physically lifted out of the walls they would normally be set in. I count five distinctly different light sources in this photo alone - and remember that the interior is one continuous, unfolding space.

but we should also look at the walls. right to left, we find three walls that are not quite parallel, not of the same height, and not built in the same way. the first one is the imposing outer wall of the first museum. its detailing and decoration is entirely conventional, but it gains its presence from sheer size.

the second wall, at a distance from the old museum, delineates the new building but does little else. it does not support anything other than itself (the roof being supported on a steel beam). yet it gains an expression of equal intensity to its much larger neighbour by being in natural stone, almost as if it were a found wall.

at an angle and at a different height is finally the main wall of scarpa's extension, separated into a concrete frame and a rendered, blank wall. I believe scarpa is creating a syntactical relationship between the separated parts which is as strong, albeit very different from, similar walls united in a traditional box. we often talk about this, especially in the later works, using words like fragments or fragmentation, but there are negative connotations to words like these that are not true of the architecture they are meant to represent.

(the steel mullions in the window facing the three graces are not original, if I remember correctly. I think they were hardwood when I saw them first some twenty years ago).

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