| Il giardino
dei passi perduti, a true dialogue between Peter
Eisenman and Carlo Scarpa, represents, at
the same time, the American architect and theoretician’s demanding
search for a disciplinary logic within architecture. Rather than mounting
a retrospective of drawings and models of his previous work, here
his thinking finds form in what he calls a kind of “excessive
hypertext.”
This exhibition is thus a realized project, set
up like a didactic work in Castelvecchio’s garden and in fragmentary
form in the corresponding rooms within the museum. Its starting
point comes from the cement floors with stone stripes created by
Scarpa for the five rooms known as the Galleria della Scultura.
Five platforms of the same dimensions as these rooms have been “excavated”
by Eisenman in the garden, as though they existed before the interventions
of either architect, and situated along an axis that runs parallel
to the sequence of the interior rooms. This “Scarpa”
axis is then diagonally intersected by a new “Eisenman”
axis, hinged on Scarpa’s pivoted bridge, suggesting that a
pre-existing orientation conditioned the positioning of the Venetian
architect’s bridge, rather than vice-versa.
Not only do the two paths cross, but they also lay the foundation
for the ideas of embankment and excavation.
Along this second “path,” in fact, Scarpa’s slabs
are broken to reveal a fragmented amalgam of some key Eisenman projects:
the Cannaregio Piazza, the IBA social housing complex in Berlin,
the Wexner Center for the Visual Arts in Columbus, Ohio, the Musée
du Quai Branly in Paris, and the Cidade da Cultura de Galicia in
Santiago.
The dominant element in this Eisenman mix is the red pivoted grid
from the residential complex in Berlin and the Santiago de Compostela
projects. The grid extends into the interior rooms of the museum,
where it appears as interstitial fragments emerging between Scarpa’s
floors and the castle walls.
These remains of the Eisenman grid not only create a momentary resonance
with Scarpa, inviting contemplation of the relationship between
the nineteenth-century structure and the twentieth-century intervention
by the Venetian architect, but also involve the staircase and the
distribution of the sculpture pedestals by Scarpa, thus casting
new light on his renovation. The New York architect’s intention
is to confound the relationship between time and place, and to pose
the question: what is the original project? Is it the castle, the
Scarpa renovation, or the Eisenman installation?
In reality, his work, in addition to revealing Scarpa’s intervention,
is an extraordinary creation of contemporary art, capable of transforming
the very nature of the museum for the next three months.
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The installation
technical aspects
The project is realized in front of the façade facing the castle’s
internal courtyard, with five excavations of piazze, which correspond
in plan to the rooms of the lower Galleria. These five piazze, a maximum
of 20 centimetres deep, are bordered with steel sheeting. On top of
them, positioned according to the shifted Eisenman axis, are variously
slanted volumes, also in steel, that contain a flooring that re-proposes
that inside the Galleria: smooth cement, with intervals of “stripes”
in white Lessinia stone, inserted at the same rhythmic intervals as
those in the interior. The surrounding dunes, made of earth and with
underlying metallic forms that soften their profile, have a maximum
height of about 1.20 metres and are blanketed on the surface with
a carpet of grass.
The grid, also made of steel strips, is underscored with a bright
red varnish and continues in the interior rooms of the museum, visible
only in strategic points, in respectful co-existence with the evocative
image of the Galleria.
The video stations
While the emergence of the red grid follows a plotted route in the
first three rooms of the sculpture Galleria, the last two rooms host
video stations where visitors may view two films. The first documents
the various phases of work on the Verona installation, while the second
illustrates Eisenman’s past projects and works-in-progress,
such as the Cidade da Cultura de Galicia currently under construction
in Santiago di Compostela, and other projects shown in the catalogue.
A brief biographical excursus shows how Eisenman’s youthful
quest for an autonomous architecture, daringly experimented in the
1970s, has given way to an approach to building that absorbs the vastness
of the landscape and faces the enigmas of history.
With an increasing number of projects in course in recent years, Eisenman’s
architecture has begun, in fact, to dialogue with its sites and to
re-invent itself as a depository of memory, whether real or fictional.
According to Kurt W. Forster, «no other contemporary architecture
tests itself as a beacon of memory to the degree that Eisenman’s
does ».
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