A lot of discussion of architecture – especially on social media – revolves around style wars. But the battle of old against new, modern against classical, the thrill of year zero versus the familiar continuity of tradition ignores the many modern designers who thrived between these two sides, burrowing away through adding new ideas about space and material on to classical buildings, and bringing craft, tactility and individuality into the hard-lined machine aesthetics of Modernism. Perhaps nobody was so fixated on juxtapositions between old and new as the Italian architect Carlo Scarpa, whose council chamber for the city of Parma, designed in 1953, was recently opened to the public for the first time.
Although Scarpa designed a few stand-alone buildings, most of the work that made his name between the 1950s and 1970s consists of museum interiors and shopfronts, almost entirely in northern Italy. On the street, there’s the double-height modern showroom in the Piazza San Marco for Olivetti, or the strange, Kubrickian concrete frontage for Gavina furniture in Bologna; in interiors, there’s his remarkable series of museums carved into old buildings: at the Castelvecchio in Verona, the Accademia in Venice, or the Revoltella museum in Trieste. These are some of the most endlessly intriguing modern spaces of the 20th century, but they’re explicitly aimed against the idea of exhibiting artworks, whether historical or modern, in in a neutral ‘white cube’. On the contrary, Scarpa’s interiors created a series of frames, pathways and raised plinths that were individually designed around each artwork, frequently so that a particular quality of light could hit each one, or so that particular artworks would be juxtaposed against each other or against the building’s historical fabric. Nothing is generic or universal – each detail is a one-off, each painting or sculpture is an event.
Sometimes this approach could be a little bit much – Scarpa exulted in the tiniest details of handles and railings and steps, to a degree that can sometimes come across as obsessive, even fussy – but it’s these dialogues between past and present that make him so interesting. The council chamber in Parma is a perfect example. This is within the Palazzo della Provincia, a strict Neoclassical building in the centre of the city, designed by Nicolo Bertoli in 1833; it was redesigned by Scarpa in 1953 after partial war damage. The chamber is the centrepiece, where the elected town council met.
There’s a political resonance to this that goes beyond the simple fact of it being a town hall. Parma is one of the major cities of Emilia-Romagna, which was, when Scarpa was working here, the heartland of the Italian Communist Party, which governed this region continuously from the end of the war until the party dissolved itself in 1991. So Scarpa’s desks, chairs and furnishings are flanked by full-scale socialist realist murals, by the painter Armando Pizzinato, with whom Scarpa worked closely: so here, the classicism of the original building is combined not only with Scarpa’s Modernism, but also with explicitly socialist visual tales and episodes.
Pizzinato fought in the Italian resistance during the war; his vast murals commemorate a massacre of partisans in 1944, and Parma’s ‘barricades’, when in 1922 citizens fought off an attempted invasion of the city by Mussolini’s squadristi, the last successful anti-fascist action before the war. But the centrepiece is an optimistic vision of work and reconstruction, with new homes being built, food being grown, lives being remade, a vision of a place gradually recovering from an episode of thuggery and madness. This beefy, heroic, highly colourful imagery is carefully counterposed with Scarpa’s dainty way with wood, metal and leather, in the desks and chairs that take up most of the space of the chamber, and in the typically intricate joins and supports of the railings. The result isn’t just an unusual and powerful space, but a fragment of a disappearing Italy – confident, Modernist, anti-fascist, building a new world not on top of the ruins of the old, but within them.
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