Though I don’t speak Italian, the word brutto popped into my head as I was walking through Carlos Scarpa: The Architect at Work, an exhibit of his drawings at Cooper Union. These aren’t drawings to frame and hang in the living room like Frank Gehry’s lyrical doodles. These are, as the title suggests, documents Scarpa is using to hammer out geometries, proportions and details for two projects he completed in the 1980’s near the end of his life: Villa Ottolenghi and Villa Il Palazzetto.
Scarpa is an architect’s architect, so I’m a bit embarrassed to admit that I don’t care for the work of his that I’ve seen in photographs. His buildings have an obtuse physical expressiveness that overwhelms spatial clarity. Why does every column, door handle, and water spout (the architect is from Venice and often incorporates water elements), need to be so highly particular? But I was charmed by the drawings at Cooper, which are both precise and dreamy. Scarpa isn’t drawing to show what each house will look like but to determine what it will be. He drafts construction lines with a hard, fine pencil and then fleshes them out with shading, color-coding, notes, and numbers. The sheets have a sodden quality; they’re thick with work and thought.