Carlo Scarpa

[Jelena Pascuttini Interior Design (JPID)]

Brion-Vega Cemetery Commentary "With the Brion Cemetery, Scarpa made his impact with an unreserved commitment ot the modern movement and a new sureness of language, in continuity but not imitation of Wagner, Hoffman, Loos, and [Frank Lloyd Wright]. He re-created here the splendor of nineteenth-century Middle Europe, where beauty had the power to redeem man from his limitations. He avoided the narrow dictates of rationalism, choosing rather to stress inner depth, dreams, and nostalgia.

"He did not need new compositional themes or forms. He already knew everything he needed to reach his objective. His original intuitions about the continuity of language and feeling crystallized in the building of this cemetery."

— Maria Antonietta Crippa, Marina Loffi Randolin, ed. Carlo Scarpa: Theory Design Projects. p61.

The Creator's Words

"I would like to explain the Tomba Brion...I consider this work, if you permit me, to be rather good and which will get better over time. I have tried to put some poetic imagination into it, though not in order to create poetic architecture but to make a certain kind of architecture that could emanate a sense of formal poetry....The place for the dead is a garden....I wanted to show some ways in which you could approach death in a social and civic way; and further what meaning there was in death, in the ephemerality of life—other than these shoe-boxes."

— Carlo Scarpa. "Can Architecture Be Poetry." from Peter Nover, Ed. The Other City Carlo Scarpa: The Architect's Working Method as Shown by the Brion Cemetery in San Vito D'Avitole. p17-18.

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