The Castelvecchio, Verona by Carlo Scarpa

Having seen a wealth of Carlo Scarpa buildings and sculptures in Venice, I was starting to get a bit bored of the same details and the same steps and stairs, which although undoubtedly are very beautiful, they border on repetitive after the fifth or sixth time. The Castelvecchio, however, a museum located within the complex of a solid red brick fortress on the banks of Verona’s river Adige, only secured by love for all things Scarpa. Restored by Carlo Scarpa from 1957 to 1975, the museum has all the hallmarks of a classic Scarpa building, with carefully considered details ranging from the stands and fixtures holding up the Byzantine art, to the apertures and openings that mark the meetings of different materials.

The main wow-factor for me appeared after the initial series of gallery rooms, where a balancing act of ramps and staircases attach the gallery to the fortress wall and bridge across the river. Here a statue of a Lord on a horse, Cangrande- the greatest of the della Scala family, the Lords of Verona in the fourteenth century- stands precariously on a landing strip looking over the Giardini below. Here, also, Scarpa demolished part of a barracks added by the occupying French during the nineteenth century. Thus, Scarpa renovated the Castelvecchio originally built in 1354, patching up the ancient and old with the modern, not only turning the museum into a classic masterpiece mimicking the textures and forms of the Byzantine and Renaissance, but also subtly pointing the visitor to its illustrious past.

There was even a little dog who enjoyed the gardens at the Castelvecchio!

Ernö Goldfinger's House in Hampstead

In many ways, no. 2 Willow Road doesn't look that remarkable from the outside. There is nothing overtly Modernist about the exterior– it is not a stark white box– but in fact a red brick facade featuring similarly proportioned windows to it's neighbouring Georgian counterparts. What is remarkable, however, are the subtle nuances once you get inside: the changes in level, the bespoke furniture designed by Goldfinger and the famous artwork by the likes of Bridget Riley and Marcel Duchamp.

The house, designed by Ernö Goldfinger– the architect of the now 'des res' Trellick Tower– was the family home of the Goldfinger's from 1939 until Ernö's death almost fifty years later in 1987. The front facade was designed as a total entity, deceptively divided into three houses by three different coloured front doors. The Goldfingers occupied the middle house, the largest, while the other two bookended maisonettes were sold to finance the project. The red, yellow and blue colours of the front doors carry on as a carefully orchestrated colour scheme on the interior: the living spaces on the first floor are bright and colourful, while the bedroom spaces on the top floor are muted and subdued. Goldfinger also highlighted the structural elements of the house, for example, the columns are painted grey to highlight that they actually had a use and weren't just there for aesthetic reasons.

Images

Born in Budapest in 1902, Goldfinger later studied at the École des Beaux-Arts under Auguste Perret, one of the first architects to use reinforced concrete. Perret became a huge influence on Goldfinger, (in fact, his grey hat is still in the Goldfinger's archive) who encouraged him against the work of Le Corbusier in favour of a more neo-classical aesthetic using historical typologies, but executed in new materials. As with other Structural Rationalists, Goldfinger believed that materials should be kept truthful: wood should look like wood, steel should look like steel. Alongside Perret, Goldfinger was also influenced by Adolf Loos and his idea of an open-planned interior. During the war, when there wasn't much work about, Goldfinger took to writing about the psychology of architecture, arguing that it is more interesting to walk around an interior if there are changes in levels or ceiling heights. At 2 Willow Road, you enter a small and dingy hall, only to be raised by a spiral staircase into the bright and animated living and dining spaces. Again, on this level, the visitor is constantly surprised and entertained by the series of rooms, as they progress from the bottom to the top of the house. In his wife Ursula Goldfinger's studio, there is even a small raised platform where models used to sit while she created her artwork. 

The real attention to detail comes in the furniture and interior design. Goldfinger used little tricks to maximise space on the small plot: rolling doors on cupboards, sliding doors between rooms, hidden cisterns and storage units built flush into the concrete walls. Most of the furniture was designed by Goldfinger himself, from chairs with wooden backs that tilted for comfort, to open shelving with gaps at the back for airflow and also the desk in his studio with drawers that pivot out on the desk legs. Influenced by the Surrealists, and friends of Max Ernst and Lee Miller, Goldfinger continually created 'frames within frames'. The windows of the top bedrooms are wrapped in wood to frame the view of the Heath, and the pictures in the living room are framed by a wooden screen that extends into the adjoining room to form shelves. These are all pragmatic solutions that make an essentially modernist building more tactile, more humane and more approachable.

If you get the chance, take a visit to this little gem, which tells you as much about the bohemian lifestyle of the 1930s Hampstead art scene and intelligentsia, (Mies van der Rohe apparently slept in the spare bedroom before he received his Royal Gold Medal, Bridget Riley gave a painting to them based on an argument, and novelist Ian Fleming supposedly named a villain in a Bond book Auric Goldfinger after petitioning against the construction of the Willow Road terrace) as about the life and work of Ernö Goldfinger.

 Images ©National Trust Images/Dennis Gilbert

Fondazione Querini Stampalia by Carlo Scarpa

While on my trip to Venice for the Architecture Biennale, I also paid a trip to the Fondazione Querini Stampalia, which includes a bookshop carved out by architect Mario Botta, and a renovated ground floor by Venetian architect Carlo Scarpa. The former Palazzo, previously rendered unusable by the frequent invasion of sea water, was given a new lease of life by Scarpa, with the use of gutters and stone steps, which allow the water to come in by just the right amount. The attention to detail continues into the garden, with intricate water features and bands of golden mosaic tiles.

 All images my own

13th Venice Architecture Biennale 2012- Aldo Rossi Exhibition

For the past week I have been in Venice for the 13th Venice Architecture Biennale, working for the British Council on the British Pavilion, Venice Takeaway, and doing a few posts for Building Design. Hence the lack of attention to this blog, but I do have plenty of blog posts to be catching up with, sharing with you my favourite bits from the Arsenale and Giardini over the next few days.

Below is a blog post I did for BD on an Aldo Rossi exhibition. You can see the post here on the Venice Blog on bdonline, or if you are a subscriber you can look at this week's Digital Edition of the magazine here.

Aldo Rossi, Image: Anni Settanta

In an exhibition space designed and installed by Renzo Piano, on the southern most tip of the Dorsoduro, and adjacent to former boating warehouses, is a small but perfectly formed exhibition on Milanese architect Aldo Rossi. For the duration of the Biennale, the Fondazione Emilio e Annabianca Vedova is showcasing sixteen theatre projects by the architect, from the early seventies to the late nineties. Enter a grey wooden door, and you are enveloped by a similarly grey wooden landscape, associated with the maritime constructions of its neighbours, and neatly sloping up to the back of the hulled out warehouse.

Intersected by giant 1:5 Rossi models, the exhibition space is a theatrical stage set in itself. Among the highlights is the Teatro de Mondo from 1979, complete with an almost life-size blue and yellow construction of the theatre. Rossi said of the lighthouse-like form, inspired by the architecture of Venice and the black wood of the gondolas, ‘Its structure could only be wood…it is the house of light for those observing and being observed’. It is just a shame that the visitor to the exhibition could not step into the model themselves, to peer in and out of the Wendy house styled windows.  

Perhaps most illuminating about Aldo Rossi’s fantastic vision for theatres is the competition project for the Teatro Paganini in Parma from 1964. Rossi describes the problem of conceiving a monument, ‘I have always thought of architecture as a monument, of its indifference to secondary functions. In the great eras of theatre…the theatre was there forever as a monument. Greek theatre was part of the urban fabric, it contained the city. I have designed cylinders and columns, lines and angles, and have raised a triangular conduit above the city and various porticos. In this way, I have sought to create an urban architecture, to give a public character to the theatre’.

The Teatro Domestico, built for the ‘Domestic project’ exhibition, at the Triennale de Milano of 1986 is accompanied by tea and coffee pots produced on a giant scale as stage props by Alessi. These were designed for the wooden structure of a home, a stage set cut into a sectional model to show the domestic ornaments ridiculously out of proportion to their surroundings. A turquoise horse stands proudly on a podium next to the Alessi coffee pots, taken from Giacomo Puccini’s Madame Butterfly, which inaugurated the summer season of 1986 at the Teatro Comunale di Bologna. The last theatre project comes from the competition entry of 1997 for the Gran Teatro la Fenice in Venice, which Rossi did not live to see finished.  

Alongside these objects are over 120 drawings and sketches, from carefully laid-out blueprints, to rough sketches, and perhaps best of all, fantastical and atmospheric watercolours. In this way the visitor experiences the typical way Rossi worked, from a narrative to a built object. If you have time to venture out of the hub of the Giardini and Arsenale, this exhibition should be the first thing on your list. The setting is ideal, set along a waters edge that is as dramatic and colourful as Rossi’s expressive visions. Outside the gallery there was even a golden crane used for lifting boats into the water, decorated with carnival patterns and traditional Venetian red stripes, a sleepy Venetian sailor taking a siesta underneath it. Now that couldn’t really happen anywhere else.

All images my own except otherwise specified.