Architects Carlo Scarpa and Aldo Rossi star in a documentary on Rai 5

Airing Friday, Jan. 15 on Rai 5 as part of Art Night, at 9:15 p.m., Carlo Scarpa and Aldo Rossi. Masters of Poetry and Memory, a series of two documentaries conceived and directed by Francesco Conversano and Nene Grignaffini and produced by Movie Movie, dedicated to the figures and work of two great masters of 20th century Italian architecture. Carlo Scarpa and Aldo Rossi were two architects extremely different in training and vision, masters of poetry and memory, both in search of an architecture that transcended time: Aldo Rossi seemed to find answers in the abstract thought of things, Carlo Scarpa in the concrete way of bringing them to light.

Carlo Scarpa (Venice, 1906 - Sendai, 1978) was one of the fundamental figures of 20th-century Italian architecture. A master in the knowledge and use of forms and materials, Scarpa was considered by many of his contemporaries not an architect (along with other greats such as Le Corbusier and Mies van Der Rohe he did not graduate in Architecture) but rather...an artist. Carlo Scarpa generated a unique way of doing architecture, creating a personal world whose works put him on the Olympus of twentieth-century architecture. Scarpa was extremely attentive and obsessive in his attention to detail and this set him apart from most architects: the relationship between the smallest and the largest of elements created a world of symbolism, continuity and analogies in his works. His inspirations came from the far West (Frank Lloyd Wright) and the Far East (the Japanese architectural tradition). Each of his projects became a work in which the ancient and the contemporary, memory and poetry, happily coexisted. Carlo Scarpa’s ideas and vision found in Venice the city that more than any other reflected his thinking (think of his design for the Fondazione Querini Stampalia). Thanks to his vocation for teaching, Scarpa contributed to the training of several generations of architects, to whom he passed on his love and knowledge of history, materials and craftsmanship.

Aldo Rossi (Milan, 1931 - 1997) was a complex figure in the field of Italian architecture in the second half of the twentieth century also thanks to the scope of his thought and theoretical elaboration, the important impact that his writings, first and foremost The Architecture of the City, had in the debate on the discipline of architecture. Aldo Rossi, in his search for permanent values in architecture, became a master for entire generations, and more than twenty years after his death, reflections on concepts such as the resilience of architectural typologies and the permanence of memory are revived. For Aldo Rossi, architecture was “the fixed scene of human events, charged with feelings, generations, public events, private tragedies, new and ancient facts.”

Rossi defined the city by means of a new theory of urban facts, according to which the city was an architectural artifact in continuous evolution over time: the primary elements were the so-called monuments, that is, the signs of the collective will expressed through the principles of architecture. In his lucid critique of modernity, Aldo Rossi conceived of a new way of reading the city as an urban artifact and urban forms, which independently of their functions generated permanence and memory, becoming the container and frame of urban theater and life itself. Hence the original thought and the haunting question, “what is architecture?” and how does it relate to human life? How can a city of the future be built taking into account the knowledge of the past, the memory of time visible in built forms and entities? Aldo Rossi was also the first Italian architect to receive the prestigious Pritzker Architecture Prize in 1990.

Pictured: Carlo Scarpa (photo Luciano Svegliado, courtesy Cisa Museum)

Architects Carlo Scarpa and Aldo Rossi star in a documentary on Rai 5

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