SCARPA SYNESTHETICS

Carlos Scarpa has always been a hero.

So it was with great interest when I came across this passage in Harry Mallgrave’s The Architect’s Brain;  Neuroscience, Creativity and Architecture. This quote is attributed to Marco Frascari, an architect who used to work for Scarpa.

“(Scarpa)…worked entirely through a synesthetic process that entailed, on the same page of sketches, different colors and styles of drawing with different media.  It was thru these ‘bundles of intertwined sensory perceptions’…that Scarpa was able to modulate his sensory ideas…”

“Architectural drawings then become metaphors, not in the literal meaning, but factually they are metaphorein, a carry over, a moving of sensory information from one modality to another modality.

“This sharing and combining of information between the senses, Frascari argues, is the essence of architectural thinking.”  p175

There is such great imagery in Frascari’s description.  Sketches that are bundles of perceptions.  Sensory drawings.  Architectural drawings that are factual.  (Link in these pages to Visual Facts here.)  Sharing and combining.  Sketch modality.  Intertwined metaphors.

That is all great and well and good.  But very sadly, this enticing idea of intertwined drawings and sketches that are bundles of perceptions is dropped by Mallgrave.  That’s all we get.  Next section.  Left completely.  As if this is all we need to know.  But this is like describing an egg as a smooth, ovoidal white object.  This is only the outside of the egg and what is far more interesting is what is inside the egg.

We need to know what is inside Scarpa’s synesthetic process.  Someone needs to sit down with the copius pages of Scarp’s intertwined sketches and postulate this intertwining and associations.  What was his method of working?  I would love to have far greater detail of his synesthetic process.

What was he looking at when he was drawing?  Did he draw associate influences?  If so, what were they?  When he did so, was it an elevation or axonometric drawing?  How often did he employ shadows?  Did one sketch resolve most of the problem, or was there a close iteration of sketches?  Was there great similarity or differences in these interations?  Were these overlay sketches or were they done on opaque paper?

The list of questions is endless.

And what we could learn from a detailed study of the synesthestics of Scarpa’s work is endless.