At the inside corner of the L-shaped Brion family cemetery he spent 10 years designing, in a spot where dead flowers used to be thrown away, Carlo Scarpa is buried upright standing up in knight’s position. "If there was an elegant way to die, it was his: he died in Japan in the land he had loved most, after Veneto where he first saw the light. He was wrapped in a great Kimono, an honour the people of that far off land reserve for their greatest sons and laid in a wooden box, a bed a cradle,” as the poet Ungaretti called it- “not a coffin- sealed with flowing white ribbons.”
Scarpa died in Sendai Japan, after falling down a set of
concrete stairs. According to his New York Times obituary, “after the fall, he spent
11 days in the hospital before he died in the 11th month of the year, unable to
talk and only able to write backwards, he created tiny illustrated books for
friends, making beauty until nearly the last moment.” It’s fitting that the “Numerology
which so intrigued him: The number 11 — the number of letters in his name,
though he never gave a formal explanation — is buried everywhere in his
buildings, as well as in his hundreds of strikingly beautiful, impressionistic
architectural renderings” was also embedded in the last days of his death.
Why was he in Japan, at the height of his career, at the age of 72 so far from his home in Venice? He was, he often said, ‘‘a Byzantine at heart, a European sailing towards the Orient.’’ For this trip, Scarpa was specifically in Japan tracing the footsteps of famed Haiku poet Basho’s Hiruzumai journey
Basho started his recount of his Narrow Passage to the North like this:
“Prologue Days and months are the travelers of eternity. So are the years that
pass by. Those who steer a boat across the sea, or drive a horse over the earth
till they succumb to the weight of years, spend every minute of their lives
travelling. There are a great number of the ancients, too, who died on the
road. I myself have been tempted for a long time by the cloud-moving wind-
filled with a strong desire to wander”…
In developing Brion tomb, Scarpa wrote of poetry and
architecture : “I would like to explain the Brion Cemetery…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.”
Lured to Japan by Basho’s poetry, Scarpa’s voyages to the island
taught him “the importance of harnessing water through arched bridges and
constructing recessed floors that allowed the current to become part of the
building — crucial for someone working in a city built on canals. Japan also
inspired some of his favorite motifs: spareness and balance, the absence of the
unnecessary, the imperfect grid of the shoji screen” which he would poetically
embed in his own work.
Before his own untimely death, Lou Kahn’s last writing was a
poem about Scarpa’s work - ‘Beauty’ the first sense Art the first word then
Wonder Then the inner realization of ‘Form’ The sense of the wholeness of
inseparable elements. Design consults…Nature to give presence to the elements A
work of art makes manifest the wholeness of the ‘Form’ a symphony of the
selected shapes of the elements. In the elements the joint inspires ornament,
its celebration. The detail is the adoration of Nature.”
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