Nestled within the heart of the Venice Biennale's Giardini lies one of Carlo Scarpa's most intimate architectural achievements - the Giardino delle Sculture (Garden of Sculptures). This small yet profound courtyard, created in 1952 as part of the Italian Pavilion, represents a masterful example of how modern architecture can engage in subtle dialogue with historical context while creating spaces for contemplation and artistic encounter.
When most people think of Venice, they envision the iconic Piazza San Marco, winding canals, and Byzantine domes reflected in still waters. However, hidden among these familiar images is a discrete chapter of Italian modernism embodied in the architecture of Carlo Scarpa. More than just an architect, Scarpa was a craftsman of light and matter, a poet of architectural detail who possessed an extraordinary ability to listen to Venetian tradition and respond with gestures of surprising delicacy.
The city where Scarpa was born and worked has become an open-air museum of his legacy, featuring projects such as the Fondazione Querini Stampalia, the Venezuelan Pavilion, the Olivetti Showroom, and the quietly magnificent Giardino delle Sculture. Designed in 1952, this garden was conceived as a minimal intervention within the old Italian Pavilion, the central building of the Venice Biennale. Here, Scarpa transformed a residual space into a place for contemplation - an oasis of concrete and water where architecture seamlessly becomes landscape.
Carlo Scarpa (1906-1978) never obtained a formal architect's license, having been trained at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Venice. He deliberately refused to take the professional examination, keeping himself at the margins of institutional architecture. Yet this unconventional path never prevented him from creating a body of work of unusual depth, defined by an almost artisanal attention to matter and time. His approach to architecture was fundamentally different from his contemporaries, rooted in a deep understanding of materials and their expressive potential.
For fifteen years, Scarpa worked at the Venini glassworks in Murano, where he learned to work with light and transparency - themes that would later become central to his architectural practice. That formative experience shaped his sensitivity to materials: for Scarpa, glass, stone, and concrete were less construction materials than vehicles for artistic expression. He treated them with the reverence of someone who molds thought with his hands, understanding their inherent properties and potential for transformation.
Scarpa's career oscillated between design, museography, and architecture, with each discipline informing the others. His projects - from the celebrated Brion Tomb in San Vito d'Altivole to the Querini Stampalia renovation in Venice - reveal a constant search for harmony between the natural and the constructed, between new interventions and the memory of place. The Giardino delle Sculture can be seen as the starting point of this lifelong investigation into the relationship between architecture and landscape.
When Scarpa was commissioned to intervene in the Italian Pavilion for the 26th Venice Biennale in 1952, the building suffered from poor ventilation and circulation problems. Instead of undertaking a comprehensive renovation, the architect proposed a deceptively simple gesture: demolishing the roof of one interior room and transforming it into an open-air courtyard. This bold yet subtle intervention gave birth to the Giardino delle Sculture - an intermediate space between two galleries, conceived specifically to host sculptures and offer visitors a moment of rest and reflection.
Examining Scarpa's broader body of work reveals that the creation of landscapes and gardens was an essential part of his architectural philosophy. The Giardino delle Sculture, like the later Brion Tomb, exemplifies this aspect of his practice. However, at the time of its creation, such an approach received little attention within Italy's cultural and political context, where landscape design remained closely tied to the restoration of historical models rather than contemporary innovation.
In Scarpa's vision, the garden is not merely a decorative backdrop but a sensory field of experience that invites visitors to observe and feel the passage of time. By viewing landscape as an extension of architecture rather than a separate discipline, Scarpa treated the two as communicating vessels. The garden, while embracing natural elements, also functions as a sophisticated viewing device that guides the gaze, frames architectural fragments, and establishes rhythms of pause and movement.
Within the courtyard, Scarpa made several crucial design decisions that transformed the space. He removed the plaster from the surrounding walls, exposing the original brickwork and revealing the building's historical layers. At the center of the space, he installed La Pensilina, an elegant reinforced concrete canopy supported by three distinctive elliptical columns. Atop each column rests a small steel sphere placed on a pyramidal base - a nearly invisible detail that creates the remarkable illusion of a floating roof.
The curved concrete slab of La Pensilina projects soft shadows that move with the changing light throughout the day, subtly transforming the character of the space from morning to evening. This dynamic interplay between light, shadow, and architectural form demonstrates Scarpa's sophisticated understanding of how architecture can respond to natural phenomena. The canopy serves both practical and poetic functions, providing shelter while creating a focal point for contemplation.
Surrounding La Pensilina, Scarpa installed shallow reflecting pools that mirror the sky above and visually double the architecture. Water - a recurring element throughout Scarpa's work - acts here as a mediator between the material and the immaterial, between the solid architecture and the ephemeral sky. As architect Sergio Los, Scarpa's collaborator, wrote, 'The space is half earth, half water,' and thus the courtyard reconnects visitors to Venice's aquatic essence, even when the city's canals are not visible.
This modern interpretation of the classical Roman impluvium creates what Los described as 'a fragment of sky contained by walls, where nature seeps in effortlessly.' The reflecting pools serve multiple functions: they cool the space, create acoustic interest through the gentle sound of water, and establish a contemplative atmosphere that encourages visitors to slow down and observe their surroundings more carefully.
The Giardino delle Sculture functions as both a space of passage and of stillness, embodying the paradox of movement and rest that characterizes much of Scarpa's work. The apparent lightness of the concrete roof contrasts dramatically with the substantial density of the surrounding brick walls. The gentle sound of water, the cool touch of concrete surfaces, and the subtle scent of plants combine to create a multi-sensory contemplative atmosphere that stands in marked contrast to the often overwhelming sensory experience of Venice itself.
By creating this space, Scarpa fundamentally redefined the experience of exhibiting sculpture within an architectural context. The garden is not a neutral setting for artistic display, but rather an active participant in the artistic encounter. The architecture itself becomes sculptural, creating a complex dialogue between the built environment and any artworks placed within it. This integration of architecture and art would become a hallmark of Scarpa's later projects.
Contemporary artist Gabriel Orozco, who paid homage to the garden in his work 'Shade Between Rings of Air,' observed that 'it is difficult to display sculptures there, because the space itself is a sculpture.' His remark captures the essential quality of Scarpa's design: the boundary between architecture and art dissolves completely, and visitors become active participants in an ongoing play of perception. This integration of art and architecture foreshadowed many of Scarpa's subsequent works and influenced a generation of architects and artists.
Today, the Giardino delle Sculture remains one of the most discreet yet sublime spaces within the entire Venice Biennale complex. Recently restored to its original condition, it has regained its intended role as a place of pause and reflection between the intensity of the exhibition galleries. Amid the often overwhelming vibrancy and sensory overload of contemporary art exhibitions, encountering Scarpa's garden invites immediate stillness and contemplation.
It is in these moments of quiet reflection that Scarpa's understanding of architecture as a total experience - both visual and tactile, both intellectual and emotional - fully reveals itself to visitors. The garden demonstrates how architecture can create profound experiences through subtle means, without resorting to dramatic gestures or overwhelming scale. This restraint and sensitivity to human experience represents one of the most valuable lessons contemporary architects can learn from Scarpa's work.
In this small but significant garden, Scarpa's architectural vision manifests with complete sincerity, reaffirming one of his most characteristic approaches: introducing modernity without aggression, favoring the subtlety of dialogue over the shock of rupture. This delicacy aligns perfectly with Scarpa's own philosophical approach to architecture. As he once remarked, 'If architecture is good, those who look at it and listen to it will feel its positive effects without realizing it.' In the Giardino delle Sculture, that transformative effect operates silently but unmistakably, continuing to influence visitors more than seventy years after its creation.
