Carlo Scarpa. Layers

In recent decades, Carlo Scarpa's relevance has been steadily on the rise. Strategies of adaptive reuse and adjustments to existing fabric are consis tent with a growing agenda of sustainability and re sourcefulness. At a time when architects have to develop aesthetic systems following an integrative approach, treating existing urban and built context as a narrative to continue, Scarpa's ouvre remains a source of inspiration. Scarpa's use of architectural layering analysed and explained in this book could serve as a contemporary strategy that is nonhierar chical and free of stylistic idioms.
Buildings such as the Castelvecchio in Verona show that architecture is capable of communicat ing its own history, that it carries meaning while developing a contemporary dynamic of its own.
Scarpa's layered architecture makes time-related sedimentation of material and content readable. It is especially at points of transition and joints that layering becomes an element that elucidates the tectonic and spatial qualities of the building.
In this book Anne-Catrin Schultz presents her research related to the phenomenon of layering in Scarpa's architecture. Layering describes the phys ical composition of built layers defining space while including the presence of cultural references and associations.
Scarpa's work is an embodiment of multidimen sional layering and a focal point for architectural movements of this time that share a similar ap proach. In most buildings, the principle of layering may be regarded as something that is part of the nature of construction. Functional conditions call for separate planes, elements or »layers«, some of which provide the structure while others take care of the protection from weather and climate. How ever, architectural layering goes beyond the mere fulfillment of technical requirements - the principle of layering may be used as formative method that allows elements of different origins to be combined into a nonhierarchical whole. Layering is complex and creates references to our world at large.
The first part of the book examines Scarpa's in tellectual roots and puts them in perspective with relevant examples of architecture theory, such as Gottfried Semper's theory of clothing. The second part displays an analysis of three projects, the Castelvecchio and the Banca Popolare in Verona and the Querini Foundation in Venice.
Anne-Catrin Schultz studied architecture in Stuttgart and Florence. Following postdoctoral re search at the Massachusetts Institute of Technol ogy, she practiced for several years at Turnbull Griffin Haesloop and Skidmore Owings & Merrill in Francisco. She has taught at the University of California in Berkeley, the California College of the Arts and the San Francisco City College in San San Francisco. In 2013, she joined the faculty at Wentworth Institute of Technology to teach archi tecture history and theory.