L'Italo-Americano

THURSDAY, JANUARY 8, 2015 www.italoamericano.com L'Italo-Americano 9 With Tobia Scarpa's restoration of the Accademia Galleries, the museum complex becomes the largest state museum in Italy ambition of transforming the for- mer obsolete structure into a f u n c t i o n a l m u s e u m r e s t o r e d according to international stan- dards. I determined with my team of experts which issues we had to resolve, e.g., the lighting of the paintings, the air-condi- tioning system, and the accessi- bility of the museum to all. My main concern was how to l i g h t t h e p a i n t i n g s p r o p e r l y , since this problem has unfortu- nately been overlooked in many museums. As far as the air-con- ditioning system is concerned, there is not much space for it in the old palazzos, so we placed it underground, under the court- yard, facing Palladio's facade. While we were experimenting and proceeding with the restora- tion work, we realized the floor had risen by one meter because Venice is located in a big basin (the lagoon), and this creates a number of natural phenomena, among which are the high and low tides constantly alternating every six hours. The buildings t h i s w a y b r e a t h e i n a n d o u t , expand and contract, because the city is not rigid at all but very elastic. When the walls of the museum are impregnated with sea water, you are defeated from t h e s t a r t b e c a u s e t h e s a l t i s t r a p p e d i n s i d e t h e m . I t t o o k years of study to determine alter- natives for extracting the water and treating the walls in order to restore them to their original aspect. FV: The transformation of t h e n e w g a l l e r i e s o f t h e A c c a d e m i a M u s e u m h a s required over twelve years of restoration. Can you highlight the most significant stages of this demanding project, which T h e g a l l e r i e s o f t h e Accademia Museum in Venice have recently been re-opened to the public, following a radical restoration by Venetian architect Tobia Scarpa, begun in 2001, which has doubled the exhibi- tion space from 6,000 to 12,000 square metres. This intervention h a s m a d e t h e A c c a d e m i a Museum the largest state muse- um in Italy, as pointed out on the opening day by Renata Codello, the coordinator of the whole pro- ject, and Massimo Cacciari, the former mayor of Venice who endorsed this highly demanding architectural endeavour. F r a n c e s c a V a l e n t e ( F V ) : What was it like to follow the footsteps of your father, and restore one of the most impor- tant museums of Venice, if not of Italy, while taking care to integrate the existing facade and staircase by Palladio? T o b i a S c a r p a ( T S ) : S i n c e 1945 the Accademia Museum has been a rather interesting s p a c e . T h e c u r a t o r , V i t t o r i o Moschini, had asked my father to renovate the spaces of the Accademia, which at that time had a rather modest nineteenth- c e n t u r y a p p e a r a n c e . T h e Republic of Venice started in the ninth century and developed and p r o s p e r e d u n t i l 1 7 9 8 , w h e n Napoleon handed it over to the Austrians. It was Napoleon, as a matter of fact, who started the s o - c a l l e d A c a d e m i e s , e v e n though he tried to transfer many Italian masterpieces to France and destroy the Dukedom of Venice. The restoration of the Accademia Museum was very complex for many reasons. It is a project developed with the turned the Venetian museum into a space larger than the Uffizi Galleries in Florence? TS: Indeed it has been a very complex project. From the very beginning of the restoration we have done a tremendous amount of work, especially if you think that we kept within the estimated budget, which is almost unthink- able in a bureaucratically-bound country such as Italy. It took quite some time but you have to take into consideration that for all these years the upper levels of the museum were open to the public. This placed constraints on the timetable for our work, but the restoration in no way i n t e r f e r e d w i t h t h e p u b l i c ' s e n j o y m e n t o f t h e g a l l e r i e s . Among the many challenges we had to cope with was uniting all the halls of the building into a single museum itinerary. FV: In what way does your intervention interact with the other spaces of the building, which include over eight cen- turies of history? T S : T h e b u i l d i n g o f t h e Accademia is the expression of 813 years of history and is itself an exceptional protagonist of Venetian history. It is a monu- ment to visit and love because each single part has something to tell you. It is with great joy that we tried to maintain the histori- cal reading/imprint characteris- tics of the different parts of the complex, trying to reconcile an extraordinary journey back in time with the highly technologi- cal solutions we adopted. We were also enthusiastic about the opportunity of interacting with t h e w o r k s o f P a l l a d i o a n d Canova within the project. Who wouldn't be? FV: How did your passion for architecture and design originate? TS: Out of a desire for finan- cial independence. I was an only child, I was 18, and the only things I knew were to draw and conceive a project. My first job was in Murano, in a glass facto- r y . I w a s l u c k y t o o b t a i n Massimo Vignelli's position at Venini's, when he decided to move to Boston. F V : T h e P i g r e c o c h a i r FRANCESCA VALENTE marked the beginning of your career in design but also of your collaborations with the business world. How did you manage to reconcile your artis- tic objectives with the laws of industrial production? TS: At the beginning I was hesitant to deal with the com- m e r c i a l f u r n i t u r e i n d u s t r y because I saw it as a monster interested only in money-mak- ing. I designed the Pigreco chair for an exam at the University of Venice, under Professor Franco Albini. He gave me the lowest m a r k , w h i c h i n f u r i a t e d m y father. Paradoxically, it was with the Pigreco chair that I started my own line of furniture. F V : A n d t h e t r i a n g u l a r table, how was that developed? TS: It started when my father got the Olivetti Prize. I was so happy to design an object, a pro- totype of a table to be used for an intimate party at home to cel- ebrate this important honor. I m a d e t w o c o p i e s o f t h e table, twice the size of the proto- type; one got lost and the other was given as a wedding gift to the Venetian composer Luigi Nono. The book recently published by Electa includes all the works I have designed. The act of taking on a new project is very appealing to me because I am forced to explore what I do not yet know. I have conceived and designed the most disparate things, including a sail- boat eighteen metres long with two engines, two rudders, and an adjustable keel for world cham- pionships. I had never designed anything like that before. I did it to challenge myself. F V : C a n y o u e x p l a i n i n detail your relationship with technology and how you used it in such projects as the Cloud and the Biagio lamps? I am personally very attracted to the Biagio lamp not only for the material you used but also f o r i t s s h a p e . I t i s m o r e a sculpture in marble than a simple lamp. I would like to know how you conceived and realized it. TS: My father and I designed the Nuvola/Cloud together, but I did not always see eye to eye with him because it repeated some elements already devel- o p e d b y C a s t i g l i o n i . B u t h e wanted to have it made at all costs. It was produced by Flos. As far as the Biagio lamp is con- cerned, it all started with a col- l a b o r a t i o n b e t w e e n L i c i s c o Magagnato, at that time Director of the Castelvecchio Museum in Verona, and my father. Knowing I was a designer, Magagnato asked me to do the layout and installation for an exhibition in Carrara, based on explorations of the possibilities offered by the local marble. I was interested in experi- menting with what machines could do with marble. In ancient times a long steel rod fixed to wheels was used to cut marble blocks; therefore, I thought we could use these same machines, but to shape rather than simply cut the marble. We took a block of marble, which, once cut, we shaped into a circular form, and made into an everyday object, a lamp in the shape of a shell, luminous and almost transpar- ent. This happened in 1968, the same year in which I conceived and created the lamp which I named Biagio in remembrance of Biagio Marin, a well-known poet from Veneto who studied in V i e n n a a n d w r o t e t h e m o s t exquisite and profound poetry in Venetian dialect. I was inspired by the last line of his poem enti- tled "The timeless time of the sea" (1964) in which the space- time relationship can be grasped by perception itself, and dark- ness and light become one. Renovation of the Accademia Museum in Venice Architect and designer Tobia Scarpa Renovation of the Accademia Museum in Venice

• Cover