The Punctum of Melancholia

A Preamble to the Rest of Time at the Brion Vega Cemetery

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Federica Goffi

Carleton University, Canada

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In a 1984 publication attempting a retrospective assessment after Carlo Scarpa’s death in 1978, Manfredo Tafuri (1935–1994) – a colleague of Scarpa’s at the Iuav – stated that “Scarpa’s […] mastery of fragments, […] his language seems based on a poetic that […] might be read in a ‘melancholy’ key, as a modern translation of Benjamin’s baroque allegory.”[1]

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Indeed, Scarpa’s projects engage time in both of its dimensions of before and after, they remain unfinished, awaiting time’s weathering and melancholic effects. During a presentation at the Akademie der bildenden Künste in Vienna on November 16, 1976, Scarpa said that the “Tomba Brion […] will even get better over time.”[2]

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Scarpa, who expressed dissatisfaction with burial sites in cemeteries reduced to “shoe-boxes” following the establishment of Napoleonic graveyards in Italy, designed the Brion Vega Memorial as a place of serenity,[3] for melancholic mourning and remembering.[4] The Brion Vega Memorial stands in contrast to the San Cataldo Cemetery (competition 1971, completion 1978) in Modena designed by Aldo Rossi with Gianni Braghieri, which was described by Portuguese architect Diogo Seixas Lopes (1972-2016) as “an architecture that evolved under the sign of melancholy” with a “gloomy athmosphere,”[5] and by Aldo Rossi himself as an “abandoned factory” or an “empty house.”[6]

Meditating at the Water Pavillion of the Brion Vega Memorial, offers a preamble to the rest of time. Here, visitors are reminded of the transitory nature of human life by making present that which is absent. Here, the weathering of materials amplifies the melancholia of the passing time. An architecture in tune with its environment does not seal itself from it; rather, it is a part of it. Carefully constructed ambiences read into the atmosphere of the place. Such acceptance of time can be observed in many projects by Scarpa. The punctum of melancholia manifests when and where, in a Proustian way, all of times past is regained at a specific moment and place, thus presencing an absence.

 

[1] Tafuri, Manfredo. “Carlo Scarpa and Italian Architecture,” in Carlo Scarpa: The Complete Works, edited by Francesco Dal Co and Giuseppe Mazzariol, translated by Richard Sadleir, Rizzoli International Publications, New York, 1985, 77. Benjamin, Walter. The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Translated by John Osborne. London, NLB, 1977.

[2] Scarpa, Carlo, ‘Can Architecture Be Poetry?’, in The Other City, Carlo Scarpa, Die Andere Stadt. The Architect’s Working Method as Shown by the Brion Cemetery in San Vito D’Altivole, edited by Philippe Duboy and Peter Noever, Ernst & Sohn, Berlin, 1989, 17.

[3] The notion of serenity in this project is put forth by Scarpa’s former collaborator, architect Guido Pietropoli. Pietropoli, meeting with author, 7 July 2017, Rovigo, Italy. Pietropoli, Guido, ‘L’invitation au voyage’, Quaderns D’Arquitectura I Urbanisme 158, September 1983: 4–8.

[4] Ibid., 18.

[5] Seixas Lopes, Diogo, Melancholy and Architecture: On Aldo Rossi, Park Books, Zürich, 2015: 126, 126-192.

[6] Rossi, Aldo, A Scientific Autobiography, translated by Lawrence Venturi, The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, London, 1981: 39, 8-15, 38-39, 45.