(initially published on 25 August 2024, under the title ‘LA TOMBA BRION, la fragilità delle cose’)
I periodically visit the Brion Memorial. I remember it before maintenance a few years ago, when it was called Brion Tomb. Before its philological restoration, it was easier to understand the fragility of the poietic balances achieved by Carlo Scarpa in the Altivole cemetery. The balance between construction, composition, and redundancy of detail is still mesmerizing and perhaps unparalleled: it is certain to be a masterpiece.
As is often the case, cemetery architecture manages to challenge certain assumptions of architectural making, and the Brion Tomb is no exception. Adolf Loos, in Ornament and Crime of 1908, argued that every tomb, even a simple mound, is architecture. This aphorism establishes the autonomy of architecture as artifice, with no dependence on technical or ornamental matters. It is a line drawn by modernity, by its action of simplification and removal of the unheimlich. The autonomy of architecture is decisive if one considers it as the foundation and end of a civilization, the discipline whose task is the most important for man: the creation of cities (Moneo, 1976, p. 46). The legacy of the prefix archè — denoting superiority, pre-eminence, excellence (Masiero, 1999, p. 13) — has shaped centuries of thinking about the discipline, albeit with spurious results. The architect, according to the Greek etymon, brings order, but for this he must weave plots, conceal machinations (ibid., p. 14). Modernity (of which Loos is a part), on the other hand, has demanded that architecture shed this role of mediator between nature and artifice. In modernity, logical thought claims to purge construction definitively of all hidden plot, all murky machinations. With modern thought, technique has become the problematic field of building, the container of the dark side of architecture. Only by setting technique aside could modernity arrive at the condition described by Rizzi: “when architecture is a formed thing, when it no longer belongs to the dimension of the idea (…), it is essentially connected with the thought that thought it. This innate quality not to lie can be called its most intimate virtue” (in Severino, 2003, pp. 15-16). According to Rizzi, architecture to be truthful cannot also be a technical matter. This separation has generated numerous setbacks in the art of construction. In the final analysis, then, Loos’s aphorism describes the minimal, technique-free artifice of the mound, which becomes the symbol of an architecture devoid of machinations, in which the truth of construction is revealed without mediation.
In the Brion Tomb, technique has recovered its original role instead, and machination has finally become part of building again. This is why, when we visit Scarpa’s work in Altivole, Loos’s words risk not letting us really see the intense technical richness of the construction, prompting us to turn every poetic and constructive choice into evanescent allegory, into something that has meaning only if it refers back to something other than itself: water for life, alabaster for spirit, wood for renewal, concrete for temporality, the plant component as a threshold between landscape – human – and natural order, and so on. I could list other pairings as well, and they would probably be equally correct, all equally meaningful, as was the case with the interpretations of Duchamp’s Great Glass – an artist beloved by Carlo Scarpa, as he understood the aesthetic power of a technique freed from the obligation of finality. Unfortunately, meaning is far from stable, as it is refreshed in interpretation and tends to slide toward the subjective. Therefore, I do not intend to add anything to what has already been written about the events, meanings and allegories of Scarpa’s Brion Tomb, but only to seize it as an opportunity. Writing, here, about the Brion Tomb is thus little more than a pretext for discussing architectural making.
That of the Brion Tomb is undoubtedly a well-known story, which is nevertheless worth reporting in its most significant features. In 1969 Carlo Scarpa, already internationally known for works rather unrelated to national and international trends, was commissioned to design the family tomb by Mrs. Onorina Tomasin Brion, widow of industrialist Giuseppe Brion, a native of Altivole. According to his last wishes, the deceased intended to be buried in his hometown. It is, even today, a location outside the main territorial communication networks, located on the edges between the flat horizon of a plain, fundamentally agricultural, and the very first reliefs of the Venetian Prealps.
The project to authorize the construction of the Brion Tomb was submitted to the municipality of Altivole in March 1970. Work to complete the monumental complex continued beyond 1978, the year of Scarpa’s untimely death from an accidental fall during his last trip to Japan. The work was completed according to strict philological principles, partly on the basis of the mighty volume of drawings that described its execution details, materials, operation, and behavior in direct light and refraction (given the widespread presence of water in the project). Many of these drawings were revised by Carlo Scarpa, following his first visit to Japan in the summer of 1969, where he had been able to observe the temples of Nara, Kyōto, and Ise.
The monumental area in Altivole has developed, through a series of acquisitions of portions of the agricultural area along the northern and eastern sides of the village cemetery, from the initial 68 sq. m. to the 2,400 sq. m. of the realized project. The Brion Tomb complex is not a cemetery, so it cannot be described by the metaphor of a “city for the dead.” It is also not a strictly private place. It is therefore not even a “home for the dead,” but a self-referential artificial place. In the Brion Tomb, no reference is made to dwelling in order to narrate the complexity of the relationships between space, memory and location. Space, in the Brion Tomb, has little importance, as it is as artificial as the construction. This propensity to ignore the traces and striations of space – determinants, perhaps, for a morphology of the built – is a legacy of Venetianism, of its peculiar relationship between the built and the space, rooted in the inconsistency of the edge between water and air. “Before making themselves streets and houses, the Venetians had to fix, anchor the land” (Bettini, 1953, p. 11).
The category of the Brion Tomb is not space, but time.
The Brion Tomb was conceived as a funeral garden, as in Istanbul, in which the burial site is vital, accessible and walkable by the living. It is a garden of the living and not a city of the dead, an allegory adopted instead in Modena for Aldo Rossi’s 1976 San Cataldo. In a garden, earth movements and bodies of water are decisive: the Brion Tomb is for the most part raised +75 cm above the elevation of the old cemetery, and water (in basins, in conduits, in gargoyles, in machicolations) is one of its design themes. Again, we must be careful not to regard land and water as symbols or metaphors. The Tomb is a temporally active place, where change is forcibly introduced by Scarpa. Vegetation-the leaning cedar tree, then unfortunately dead and replaced by the present one, placed in the 1970s as a tent at the entrance to the propylaea from the Napoleonic cemetery-is the first compositional object we encounter in transit from the old cemetery, before entering the propylaea. After vegetation, it is water that is a powerful agent of change. As we shall see, water challenges the hydrated bonds and basic environment of the concrete reinforcement. Land, on the other hand, challenges our stasis and allows us to lift our gaze to another horizon. Time is, first of all, a continuous change, of state and pose.
We will better understand the importance of time for the Brion Tomb if we consider how dying, from an anthropological point of view, cannot be reduced to a definitive passage, since the living and the dead are one of the oldest dual masses of humanity, that is, they preserve each other. Canetti writes that dying is a struggle between enemies of unequal forces, that between the living and the dead. In dying, a very particular struggle is at stake. The battle is also simulated as a flattery for the dying. The dead who pass into the afterlife should be non-hostile toward the living (Canetti, 1960, pp. 79 – 80). The memorial act is only a part of this state of reciprocity, which admits of no dialectical overcoming and allows no progress. In sum: reciprocity does not allow any modernity. We cannot grasp this big picture with a single glance, one that goes after individual forms. A repeated gaze is needed. It needs the overlapping of individual glances, as if our personal shutter had been left open, allowing visible traces-and perhaps invisible ones-to be recorded through time.
The Brion Tomb’s fascination emanates from its irrepressible ability to continuously reverberate possible meanings, thanks to which, through the decades, it hermeneutically regenerates itself-that is, it always offers new material for subjective interpretation. It thus transcends the inevitable corrosions, construction and design errors that over time have generated its widespread degradation, until the recent philological restoration became necessary. I think it was this splendid symbolic redundancy that was one of the reasons why, before the emergence of widespread cracks in the reinforced concrete, the wonderful fragility of its material matrix was not considered instead. In the course of the restoration, it was impossible to restore that fragility, which perhaps only a different gaze-not Western, not subjective, but archaeological-could grasp. The restoration was completed in 2021, after about three years of work, (and forty-three years after the original completion of the Tomb). The philological study, conducted through the careful study of Scarpa’s drawings, seems to have functioned as an inevitable sieve, cleaning the work of everything that had no recognized or recognizable meaning. Yet there are also more minute subtexts, some collateral and intangible narrative traces, which, as Foucault states, are unfortunately continually overshadowed by the synthetic activity of the subject, busy reasserting its dominion over things in order to realize its own dwelling (Foucault, 1969, p. 20). What if we strive then to listen to these other, more feeble voices, those of materials and their temporalities? Here is the first insight of this exploration: the Brion Tomb, not having been designed as a dwelling, is free to show itself as a compendium of building, but presents it to us in all its fragility. It is thus a work particularly rich in indications of how things are made, precisely because, as a construction, it never comes to conceal in a completed form the conflicts implicit in assembling different materials. Another 1969 text comes to mind, namely Deleuze’s Logic of Meaning, which seeks to describe this condition that precedes meaning, in which we witness the distribution of pure singularities, mixed and coexisting, without yet an order or concepts to keep them from interacting, from composing themselves. It is this simple compossibility that is the foundation for a synthesis of the world (Deleuze, 1969, p. 103), and could allow us to grasp fragility as an extraordinary moment of suspension of judgment, of redefining our role as subjects, of reopening to the possible before it is reduced to a systematic set of meanings.
In some ways, Scarpa’s poetic quest also shares commonalities with Foucault’s explorations in the archaeology of knowledge and Deleuze’s in the logic of meaning. It is a quest in which the subject takes responsibility for its own formative path among things. A note by Piercorti, from his Carlo Scarpa and Japan (Piercorti, 2007, p. 54), where we read that the idea of taste for the Venetian architect was identified with the Japanese konomi, comes in handy. In konomi there is no reference to a universality (and shareability) of aesthetic principles, as in Western culture. The konomi is an act of self-determination and aesthetic rigor, the possibility for an author to set for himself certain principles to which he then adheres with great rigor. It is not an ideal of static equilibrium-as Alberti’s concinnitas might be instead-but a principle of local harmony, in the alchemical interaction between the elements, which are accorded an enduring and temporally active agentivity (agency). Moreover, upon his return from Japan in 1969, Scarpa had already experimented with the possibility of using fragile materials, such as wood, straw and paper, provided he knew how to prepare them properly. Piercorti writes that “in the Brion Tomb many details suggest such a ‘preparation,’ revealing nature as the greatest and most valuable of allies, capable of transforming that place into solicitous receptacle of emotions, objects, phenomena” (Piercorti, 2023, p. 19).
Let us try to make explicit what this preparation may consist of. It is first and foremost a suspension of the design act in order to listen to what persists in the material, either as an original feature or as a result of further transformation brought about by the interaction of agencies. Let us look at some examples. Untreated wood will congeal, if subjected to the elements it will eventually rot, but if it is ebonized-using Shou sugi ban, a Japanese surface carbonization technique that reduces wood moisture-it can remain embedded in a ceiling, surrounded by concrete. The former wood will have to be replaced; the latter can no longer be. Munz brass has a low lead content, so it can be immersed in water without polluting it; however, it has poor resistance to acids, such as those formed when carbon dioxide dissolves in rainwater. The acidic environment is also feared by concrete reinforcements, where infiltration of water with a Ph of less than 8 turns the calcium hydrates in the cement into calcium carbonate-with a general reduction in the Ph of the cement matrix-and then causes oxidation of the reinforcing metal. To prevent water penetration, waterproofing given by an additional surface layer, such as that composed of micro algae, fungi, mosses and lichens, a layer that is commonly regarded as unnecessary surface dirt, is useful. The Polytechnic University of Catalonia-Barcelona Tech-is studying applications for a cement that instead facilitates the formation and maintenance of an organic layer that can absorb CO2 and ensure a basic Ph. In this case, a balanced composition of cement, reinforcement and vegetative layer will be more like an ecosystem than a construction. Chemistry takes over from mechanics in describing what happens between the interfaces of matter. Preparation will then also concern the readiness of materials to enter sufficiently stable assemblages, even if intended to have their own composite temporality, or even a cohabitation principle. A composition focused on form and logical principles is unable to gather this richness. Composition then becomes compossibility, at the moment when the sense of each of its elements also feeds the possible functioning of other elements related to it.
The richness of these filaments of interrelation is always at risk of obliteration in the form, which tends to reduce complexity for reasons of efficiency. With the intention of conceptually enhancing this dusting of compossibility, John Tresch, in 2007, adopted the term cosmology to describe “something more than a classification system (…) that encompasses affective and aesthetic dimensions and the sense of coherence within a group, in their words, practices, and objects” (Tresch, 2007, p. 84). Here is the second insight of this exploration: the Brion Tomb achieves its status as a masterpiece precisely because it itself encapsulates a complete cosmology, conceptually self-sufficient and the poetic expression of an accomplished and mature authorial konami. This, however, is a further dimension of the fragility of the Tomb: for it will not be able to refer to universals, to metaphysics, to any rational structures other than its own fragile internal balances. We find ourselves in a cosmology opposite to the one described by Rossi and Moneo for the San Cataldo, in the same years in which Scarpa elaborates the projects for Altivole: building, in the Brion Tomb, is a completely technical fact, as Scarpa recognizes in the construction technique the capacity to deepen and explore the compossibilities that emerge among materials. The process of objectifying building-its realism-could not show itself with two applications more distant from each other: on the one hand Rossi is Cartesian and hypothetical-deductive, and architecture works to define form (Moneo, 1976 – 2004, p. 41); on the other hand Scarpa is Baconian and inductive, and building is the interweaving of knowledge and continuous experimentation.
This is a very old conceptual fork in the road that we can find in the thinking of the philosophers of nature, dating back to Aristotle and the Stoics. As Toulmin recalls, in his 1962 The Architecture of Matter, “Aristotle and the alchemists shared a single doctrine that separated them completely from the chemists of the 18th and 19th centuries. Between 1725 and 1900 it was a common belief that the basic ingredients of material things had predetermined natures” (Toulmin, 1962, p. 150). But in the 16th century, philosophers of nature such as J. B. van Helmont (1577 – 1644) still held problems of composition (how do organized beings acquire a stable form?) in higher regard than those of purpose (what purpose do organized beings have?). Not recognizing the agency of materials as playing an active role in defining their compositions is a profound epistemological shortcoming. Returning to our investigation, and summarizing, we can say that: it is possible to base a rational architecture on morphology and typology as long as its functions and only the invariable components of its materials are considered prevalent; conversely, it is possible to elaborate an experimental architecture on the other hand as long as the possibilities and limits of any composition among the materials involved in the construction are considered as the focus of the investigation. While for Rossi construction is a mental fact that finds a mirror in material realization, for Scarpa it is instead a gestural fact that waits to be inscribed in a unitary cosmogram. Both positions are reasonable, although the cognitive bearing of the second is incredibly richer. For it is precisely when things do not work, or are not available, that we can see them differently, extrapolating them from their ordinary contexts and uses; as Tresch writes, this is the starting point of scientific knowledge (Tresch, 2007, p. 87). Fragility is one of the ways in which things, whether produced or simply existing, make themselves available to others’ knowledge. For the sake of completeness we will have to acknowledge that, although it is much more stimulating, this second position is unfortunately also economically limiting, since, centuries have almost always shown that “technical research is a luxury” (Leroi-Gourhan, 1964, p. 212).
In order to highlight the traces of chemical changes in materials-a type of agency that is less obvious than mechanical agency and often relegated to the interior of production systems or in studies of the chemistry of materials-we need a non-Western gaze, therefore not focused on the stability of form and function. If we take this into account, then we can realize what a profound difference lies between the Brion Tomb depicted in Masaaki’s photos and the Brion Memorial, which we can visit today in Altivole. The latter has become far too accurate, deprived of much of that sense of objective fragility typical of the technical prototype. The impression is that it has become a signifying machine, cleaned up and forced to repeat, visit after visit, the exact same story (a love story, like that between Onorina and Giuseppe, or that between Scarpa and his work, or that between us cautious builders and the work of the Venetian architect). It is a love story forced, as tradition dictates, to be timeless. Since 2022 the Tomb has been donated to FAI. At that time it was renamed the Brion Memorial, thus fulfilling what we visitors wanted from the beginning: that it be an eternal work, a story that is always the same. The Memorial proved to the general public that this second nature of itss has considerable media power, becoming a film set for a science fiction movie that makes myth and prophecy its own timeless dimension.
Sekiya Masaaki was born in 1942, and was close friends with Tobia Scarpa, son of Carlo. The Japanese photographer had failed to graduate from college, remaining in Cambodia during his university studies to take a long photographic tour of the ruins of Angkor Wat. His greatest contribution to architectural photography, with his professional studio ArchiMedia, was the four-volume edition of Otto Wagner’s complete works in 1998. Soon after, Masaaki came to Italy, showing up at Tobia Scarpa’s home. “He left his materials his luggage with me, making my house his base. And thereafter, he came every year: he would leave his things with me and start making his rounds, photographing,” wrote Tobia Scarpa in 2023 (Piercorti, 2023, p. 7). Masaaki had a long-term project on Carlo Scarpa’s work, but it ended abruptly in 2002, with his death. The Japanese photographer photographed the Brion Tomb, before it became the Memorial, before the brittle cover of its reinforced concrete was propped up, before the lichens were annihilated on its surfaces, before the vegetation was reconfigured. Fog also appears in some of Masaaki’s photos, a sign that the Japanese photographer was really familiar with the Venetian countryside, in all its seasons.
Masaaki’s gaze is etched in his pictures, and we can hope that we can look at the Brion Tomb with the same intentions as his eyes. Is it time to ask how reasonable is it, in a discourse on making architecture, to reduce the countless chisels of the Brion Tomb only to their fragile construction, instead of searching for those similarities, those literary and poetic references that inspired Scarpa in the course of conceiving the propylaea, the arcosolium, the small temple, the water pavilion or the tomb of the loved ones? The mapping of this dense – and vast – network of poetic references has already been largely accomplished. But if we really want to investigate the Brion Tomb (and not its meanings, not its poetic reasons, and not even its allegories) we will have to be able to set aside the looming weight of the author, letting the work show itself for what it is. The direction of this exploration is supported in part by the admiration Scarpa himself showed for mechanics-which was often accompanied by vague disappointment with his industrial design colleagues-even as they had ensured extraordinary success for Giuseppe Brion’s Vega. For the Venetian master, industrial designers merely clothed splendid mechanisms in a form comprehensible to the masses. Instead, it is in the mechanisms that the assemblages’ reasons for existence demonstrate the necessary coexistence, as if there were a higher principle of truth in the assemblage than in the composition of the form. But to let the Brion Tomb show itself outside the long shadow of its author requires perhaps a less biographical reason than Scarpa’s love of mechanisms.
It is therefore necessary to reflect on the role of drawing in the context of the relationship between the subject and the world. We will not discuss here the differences between the use of drawing in Scarpa and that in Rossi—this would be very interesting but would introduce a theme that is too complex. In the formation of the foundations of modern civilization, drawing tends to be an extremely powerful tool (with multiple functions) for exercising the dominance of the subject. Latour writes that thanks to drawing, ‘you can present absent things (…). Perspective is not interesting because it allows realistic images; it is interesting because it creates complete hybrids: nature seen as fiction, and fiction seen as nature, with all the elements made so homogeneous in space that today it is possible to shuffle them like a deck of cards’ (Latour, 1986, p. 7). Drawing (pencil-only, according to Scarpa) annotates the design intentions, but it is also capable of giving the individual author the ability to control the work of many craftsmen—in the case of the Brion Tomb, these were Angelo Bratti, Saverio Anfodillo, Eugenio De Luigi, Paolo Zanon, and the Capovilla carpentry. A single drawing can describe the origin, processing, composition, and functioning of multiple objects together. Drawing displaces, gathers, and rearranges objects. If we were to imagine a one-to-one correlation between drawing and reality, as in some of Borges’ fictions, then the real Brion Tomb might not even be the one that was built—nor the restored Memorial—but the one described in the extraordinary mass of thousands of drawings (imaginative, descriptive, and executive) produced by Scarpa about the work. Following this line to its natural development, the unthinkable might happen: that in a virtual space, an artificial intelligence could revisit some parts of the Brion Tomb, provided that an extensive dataset is organized, starting with scans of the original drawings. This mental exercise helps us understand the potential power of drawing, once the author is set aside: the physical constraints of construction, with its inevitable limitations, could not alter in any way the entirety of the initial vision of the Venetian master, and they might even lead to a different work altogether.
Therefore, in a counterintuitive way, we can suggest, for the Brion Tomb, to reverse the traditional relationship between drawing and construction. The construction will be a trace of the predictive drawing, its materialized part, destined from the beginning to be a partial representation of what was initially imagined and then transcribed in pencil on tracing paper or vellum. It is this original incompleteness, this intrinsic ontological fragility, that supports our intention to view the Brion Tomb without the accompaniment of its author.
Grasping these transitions—those between the different temporalities of the objects and those enacted in the dislocations of the drawings—is quite difficult. Our gaze is not accustomed to it, as it continually compartmentalizes moments. However, the careful placement of reflective elements on the opaque surface of the reinforced concrete (the mosaic tiles, the gold inserts, and the Venetian plaster panels), along with the shapes intended to cast shadows, reveals an initial clue as to how the visual design of the Brion Tomb was, in a way ahead of its time, directed towards the ecological perception of ambient light, which ‘provides information about reflective surfaces’ (Gibson, 1986, p. 121). But there is also an additional perceptual dimension, that of listening to sound objects (as Pierre Schaeffer calls them in his 1966 Treatise on Musical Objects) that are generated by certain sound-producing elements of the Tomb, such as some of the slabs in the floor that lead, within the propylaea, toward the water pavilion. These rest on small pivots that allow them to tilt in their seating, thanks to the weight of the visitor stepping on them. In this way, they produce a dull sound. Then, to descend from the elevated garden surrounding the arcosolium towards the small temple, we find some cantilevered steps of varying lengths that emit ascending tones, vibrating under the visitors’ footsteps. By extension, we can hypothesize that the perimeter wall, inclined 60° inward, might also function as a sound deflector, as happens beneath the tomb of the loved ones. Since many objects in the Brion Tomb literally resonate, even though they do not generate pure sounds, we might think this is a simple transposition of the sound experiences Scarpa had in some Japanese gardens, where ‘one could hear, in the silence of the woods, in the silence of the park, in the silence of the garden, a sound that I couldn’t quite identify: it was water entering a bamboo tube and making a certain sound’ (Semi, 2020, p. 242). However, given the influence of musique concrète on many intellectuals of the time (including Eco, who wrote Opera Aperta thanks to discussions with Luciano Berio at the Studio di Fonologia Musicale at RAI in Milan between 1956 and 1960), we can hypothesize that Scarpa also sought to introduce some aspects of composition borrowed from experimental music. The sound object, according to Schaeffer, potentially contains musical values that are overlooked by musical theory. Schaeffer writes: ‘When in 1948 I suggested the term musique concrète, with this adjective I intended to express a reversal in the way the musical work is realized. Instead of notating musical ideas using the symbols of musical theory and having them realized by known instruments, the goal was to gather a concrete sound, regardless of its origin, and to abstract the musical values it potentially contained’ (Schaeffer, 1966, p. 7). It is when these principles of musical composition come into play, reinforcing the potential idea of the fragility of construction, that we can understand why a dear friend of Scarpa’s, the composer Luigi Nono, dedicated the piece A Carlo Scarpa, Architect, to His Infinite Possibilities to him in 1985. With just two notes, Nono gives voice to numerous possible compositions, working with their transitions and micro-interactions. No form, only an extraordinary richness of meaning
Note: I hope it’s now quite clear that the Brion Tomb and the Brion Memorial refer to the same place. I have referred to it as the ‘Brion Tomb,’ but this was merely a useful strategy for the purposes of the text. Its official name is, indeed, the Brion Memorial. The comparison between the Memorial and the San Cataldo Cemetery (which I wrote about here) stems from a simple observation: they were conceived and built in the same years by professors from the same university (IUAV of Venice), yet they are incredibly different from each other. Finally, given the secluded location of the Memorial, I’m always happy to offer a ride to friends passing through Padua, to take them to Altivole by car so they can immerse themselves in Carlo Scarpa’s intricate constructions, fortunately set outside an urban context. There’s always something unexpected to greet the visitor.
In a 1978 lecture held in Madrid, Carlo Scarpa stated that the Brion Tomb was the only one of his works he was happy to go and see (Pierconti, 2023, p. 11).
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