Carlo Scarpa: Furnishings for the Great Hall of the Ca' Foscari University, Venice 1935-1937
— By Stefano Poli, Architect, PhD at Politecnico di Milano and Carla Sonego Architect, PhD
Under the commission of Agostino Lanzillo, between 1935 and 1937, Carlo Scarpa worked on the renovation of Ca' Foscari, an imposing fifteenth-century palace overlooking the Grand Canal in Venice, which had been designated as a university headquarters. Assisted by engineer Angelo Piamonte for the structural aspects, this was the most significant work that Carlo Scarpa completed before the Second World War.
Scarpa and Lanzillo aimed to maintain the "integrity of the building's monumental character" while transforming "a private residence into a modern school".
Work began on August 1, 1936, and continued until January of the following year, when the renovated building hosted the inauguration ceremony of the academic year. On the first floor, overlooking the Grand Canal, a room was created for degree ceremonies and conferences, decorated with a fresco by Mario Deluigi. On the second floor, Scarpa designed the great hall, the core of the institute, located in the large space previously occupied by the Museo di Merceologia. This vast area was cleared and divided into a section reserved for the Authorities and the Academic Council, located near the polifora (a multi-light window), and a wooden tiered seating area at the back for students, accommodating about two hundred seats. This latter section faces the large window set back from the polifora, which extends across the entire width of the hall. The translucent window frame designed by Scarpa allows ample light into the room and recalls, in its design, the one conceived by Le Corbusier for the dormitory of the Palais du Peuple in Paris (1926).
The furniture arrangement comprised of a dense grouping of seats facing a podium (a simple wooden platform with a square pattern) and a marble panel engraved with a motto from the "Medieval Universities", requested by Lanzillo, in the background. Mario Sironi's fresco L'Italia, Venezia e gli Studi surmounts the composition, becoming an integral part of it, in a conscious process of integration between the arts that Scarpa consistently pursued throughout his career.
Scarpa was also responsible for the furnishings of various spaces in the palace, particularly the rectorate and offices, which were designed with an essential style and entrusted to the Anfodillo carpentry of Venice. The design of the fixed and mobile furnishings reflects Scarpa's contemporary reflection on the work of the Swiss master, while also proposing a dialogue between historical examples and contemporary research, a theme that was central to the thinking of the most cultured Italian architects of the time, including Marcello Piacentini and Gio Ponti. The present model chairs, designed for the Venetian Hall and consisting of a cubical-proportioned seat with a simple solid wood backrest, establish affinities with Roman and nineteenth-century models, towards which Le Corbusier also showed interest in developing his minimalist furniture.
The present model chairs at the inauguration ceremony of the Ca' Foscari University campus, Venice, 1936.
Image: © Archivio Storico dell'Università Ca' Foscari Venezia, Serie Rettorato, FotografieHowever, the relationship with the furniture designed by Piacentini between the 1920s and 1930s appears even more significant. These pieces exhibit an explicit blend of motifs from ancient and nineteenth-century traditions with modern features, achieved through elementary geometric simplification, which can also be seen, in different accents, in Ponti's furniture. A notable example of Ponti's work is the design of the furnishings for Villa Vittoria in Florence, around 1930: for the gallery intended to exhibit contemporary paintings and sculptures from the Contini Bonacossi collection and the sitting room of the main floor, Ponti designed armchairs, consoles, small tables, benches, stools, and pedestals. In these pieces, the modern character is related to tradition through the progressive geometrisation of the forms of Roman and eighteenth and nineteenth century models, reduced to the elementary solids of Euclidean geometry, yet exalted by the preciousness of the materials used.
The present model consoles in a classroom on the first floor of Ca' Foscari University, Venice, 1942.
Image: © Archivio Storico dell'Università Ca' Foscari Venezia, Serie Rettorato, FotografieThe sale will also feature two console tables (lot 4), which their model was originally designed for the conference room on the first floor, with their striking crossed stretcher motif connecting the four legs centered along the sides of the top.
In 1955-56, Carlo Scarpa was commissioned once again to redesign the Aula Magna, transforming the space with the introduction of wood panelling, cladding and partitions that enabled a more functional layout. This restoration established a dialogue between the 1930s design and building's historic architecture.
Provenance
D. family, Venice
Thence by descent
Private collection, Venice
Acquired from the above by the present ownerLiterature
Robert McCarter, Carlo Scarpa, London, 2013, p. 32
Artist Biography
Carlo Scarpa
Italian • 1906 - 1978
Phillips Design has a deep-rooted passion for the work of Carlo Scarpa, one of the twentieth century's great poets, whose rhythms, lines and materials — a grammar of space — appeal both as a local response to the architect's birth city, Venice, and a universal language of ordered dynamism.
Carlo Scarpa graduated with a degree in architectural drawing from the Accademia di Belle Arti in Venice in 1926. In the years that followed, he worked as a teaching assistant for a former professor, ran his own architectural practice in Venice and worked as a freelance artist for M.V.M. Cappellin glassworks. When M.V.M. Cappellin went bankrupt in 1932, Scarpa joined Venini & C. in Murano, where he served as artistic director until 1947. During his tenure at Venini, Scarpa developed a host of new techniques — in particular, mezza filigrano, a bollicine and corroso — that catapulted the centuries-old tradition of Venetian glassblowing to the forefront of modernist design.
2
Pair of rare chairs
1935-1937
Cherry, fabric.
Each: 82.5 x 40 x 46.5 cm (32 1/2 x 15 3/4 x 18 1/4 in.)
Produced by Falegnameria Anfodillo, Venice, Italy.
Estimate
£15,000 - 20,000 ‡
Sold for £30,480
Antonia King
Head of Sale, Design
+44 20 7901 7944
Antonia.King@phillips.com
Design
London Auction 13 November 2024
