italy

Tomba Brion /  by hugo keene

Location: San Vito d'Altivole, Treviso, Italy
Architect: Carlo Scarpa
Completed: 1968

12 Photographs

I am glad I visited Tomba Brion when I did. I had just really discovered Carlo Scarpa’s work, and I was travelling at a time when I could not afford a rental car, so had found a bus and dragged my travelling companion across the Italian countryside one bright morning, on the promise of life changing architecture, in a cemetery.

The private burial ground for the Brion family, the L shaped walled garden wraps around one side of the traditionally designed San Vito municipal cemetery. Unusual, tilted concrete walls greet the visitor from afar, before one arrives at a gap in the wall, overhung by trees, which beckons one beyond.

Upon entering, I was speechless for a bit, I wandered about, I sat and stared for quite a while and I also cried a little, though i am still not sure why. A profoundly moving space, richly layered with detail. After some time alone, a funeral procession from the village made its way up the same road we walked along earlier, which we watched for a short while. After the proceedings, the mourners drained out of the old cemetery and some went back to their lives, while a number stayed behind and filtered through the unusual looking opening between the old and new and explored the unique wonderland behind.

By the time we left, the last bus of the day had long gone, and we had to hitchhike back to Venice. 

HWLK

Nordic Pavilion /  by hugo keene

Location: Venice, Italy
Architect: Sverre Fehn
Completed: 1962

7 Photographs

I have only been to Venice once, and we arrived early in the morning. After finding our accommodations, delivering our backpacks, and getting a couple of espressos to recharge, we walked to the Giardini della Biennale. The garden is full of pavilions for all the different countries represented at the annual Biennale, and each is of varying architectural merit, but I had come there to see only one.

I first discovered the work of Sverre Fehn in a lecture given by Glenn Murcutt, who spoke about the quality of light in his buildings with such reverence that I knew I would have to find out more about his work. I had made two separate failed attempts to see his Nasjonalmuseet - Arkitektur in Oslo and had never ventured deep enough on my excursions to Norway to see anything else. While I had not come to Italy, nor Venice, to specifically see the pavilion, it had long been a building which had stuck in my memory as something extremely special.

I was visiting a few days before the Biennale began and work was ongoing to prepare for the event. As I was poking around the building, a workman noticed me and thought I was the artist coming to set up. After making no effort to correct his misconception, he unlocked the pavilion, allowed us in, and left. Nothing was arranged in the space and dust clothes remained over trunks and trolleys, but we got to spend an hour alone in the space, before the actual artist, immaculately dress and looking considerably more Nordic than us arrived and shooed us out of the space.

I remember Glenn talking about the Norwegian light and how masterfully Mr Fehn was able to harness it in his buildings. The Nordic Pavilion is essentially a single space, built from more or less one material, about more or less one thing, light. After thinking about this building for many years and trying to understand it, I think I will need to visit it again to really get it. What I have learnt in the years between though, is that, with effortless simplicity, the building seems to almost remove itself completely and transport you to the middle of a tranquil Nordic forest, in the snow.

Of all the wonders of Venice, elaborate and intricate in their own ways, this is perhaps the least elaborate, but no less remarkable.

HWLK

Olivetti Showroom /  by hugo keene

Olivetti Showroom - San Marco, Venice, Italy - Architect: Carlo Scarpa - Completed: 1958

10 Photographs

We grew up surrounded by a lot of Italian culture and Italy in its various guises has always been close to my heart. Australia, and Adelaide, in particular, received a lot of post-war immigration from ‘the old country’, our mother speaks Italian, and we have extended family who are of Italian descent. My last job before architecture was in an old Italian cafe around the corner from the Skeleton House which was famous for it’s fabulously rude service, which in truth was all sorts of fun.

While I had been to Italy before, I had never visited Venice, something which seems to be something of a right of passage for young European architects. When I began to work on the Walmer Yard project, it became apparent to Peter and Fenella that this was a shortcoming that needed to be rectified. In order to understand the richly layered textural quality that we were trying to achieve and to grapple with the innovative and unusual problem-solving techniques these two wild-cards employed, I absolutely needed go to Italy, with no delay, and reinforce my colonial ways with a few critical pieces of architectural history. I was armed by these two with a long scribbled list of weird and sometimes wildly inaccurate directions to or descriptions of places that I absolutely must seek out. A couple of weeks and a few convenient coincidences later, I found myself riding along the Grand Canal, sitting on the back of a vaporetto with my backpack.

While I found most of the important ones on the list after considerable effort and cajoling of travelling companions, the Olivetti Showroom was the least difficult to find. An obvious choice for any architect in Venice, despite it being so discretely tucked into a corner on the edge of the Piazza San Marco. When I look back on the photos, it almost seems like it is night-time in some of them, but it was not. I recall flip-flopping about in the heat, seeking refuge in the shade of the colonnade lining the square, that first layer of protection against the Mediterranean sun.

In this exquisite piece of architecture, you can see hundreds of years of Venetian design and craft history, as well as the ubiquitous sense of calm imbued in most of Scarpa’s work, the kind of quality that is usually reserved for Japanese temples. It is an unusual place, like the tiniest museum in history to a set of products that no longer exist. The showroom and typewriters are a bit like Venice itself. They are old and polished and no longer flexible enough to adapt to a new and changing world, but intricate and beautiful, nonetheless.

HWLK

San Cataldo Cemetery /  by hugo keene

San Cataldo Cemetery (The City of the Dead) - Modena, Italy - Architect: Aldo Rossi - Completed: 1971 (Unfinished)

11 Photographs

“I cannot be Postmodern, as I have never been Modern” - Aldo Rossi

Sometime during my early days of architecture school, I remember coming across a small black and white image of the San Cataldo Cemetery, otherwise known as The City of the Dead, in a book on Italian architectural history. I recall being taken by this single image, not dissimilar to the first photograph in this series. I loved the bold geometry and the simplicity of the forms. Though not a follower of religion, I have always loved religious buildings and in particular the cemeteries that often surround or are connected to them, but this was something completely different from everything I had seen before. As a young architect to be, it seemed to speak to me of the possibilities of looking at something and seeing a completely new way of doing it.

Over the years, I kept stumbling across the building in journals and books, yet it wasn’t until 2011 that I finally found myself in northern Italy, on a train to Verona passing through Modena. While the small child inside me wanted to go looking for the bright crimson red of the nearby Ferrari factory, the architect in me had only one destination in mind as I disembarked. It was a baking hot Mediterranean day, the kind that we knew only too well from growing up on Tarndanya (the Adelaide Plains) and the short walk alongside the train line was anything but pleasant.

There is something unique about the experience of an architect visiting a building they know well. When we read drawings and view images we are able to translate them (with varying degrees of success) into imagined experiences of places, but nothing quite compares to visiting a building, no matter how well you think you know it. In this, I think the qualities of great architecture are impossible to transport. It’s very difficult to distinguish the good from the great without setting foot and eye upon it. At San Cataldo, it was the previously undiscovered moments of the place that impressed me much more than the vast open scorched courtyards, despite those open views of the square red ossuary building being so beguiling to my young architectural mind. It’s a fascinating place, beautiful and confusing in equal measure.

Interestingly, it was a few weeks later that I was lucky enough to visit Carlo Scarpa’s Tomba Brion, whom Rossi triumphed over in an architectural competition for the San Cataldo commission. This effectively book-ended a journey of half a lifetime, providing me with two vastly contrasting views of death and how we might approach this from a built perspective. But that place is a story for another post.

HWLK

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