Venice Biennale Ticket Office

Ticket office for the Biennale, 1951-52, Giardini di Castello, Venice.

The ticket office at the Giardini della Biennale is a little-known work by Carlo Scarpa, despite the fact that several thousand people pass by it every year.

The ticket office for the entrance to the gardens of the Venice Biennale was created by Carlo Scarpa in 1951-52, in conjunction with the 26th International Art Biennale of Venice, together with the more famous sculpture courtyard of the Italian Pavilion. The small artifact is placed in front of thecurrent entrance to the gardens exhibitions and normally you don't need to pay for the exhibition ticket to visit it.

It is not among the most famous works of the master and it is not easy to find material about it online, apart from this drawing on the website of Ministry of Cultural Heritagewhile on archiviocarloscarpa.it it is not even mentioned among the works. However, it is included in the panorama of museum installations and exhibition pavilions that characterized the Venetian architect's work to a certain extent.

Even though it is a small ticket office, unusable with today's influx of visitors to the international art and architecture exhibitions held every year in Venice, Scarpa's hand is unmistakable.
The use of different materials and the precision of the details brings to mind his other more famous works, from Querini Stampalia to Castelvecchio, to that artisan way of doing things, to drawing to see and then to create, without any apparent solution of continuity between paper and construction site.
Even this small ticket office does not shy away from proposing figurative references that are the result of a clever manipulation of images and memory that is expressed in the refinement of the detail and in the contextualization of the materials used.

Carlo Scarpa, an architectural craftsman

It is worth remembering Augusto Capovilla, founder of the Venetian carpentry shop of the same name, with whom Carlo Scarpa began to collaborate as early as 1935, to bear witness to an "artisan" partnership that would lead the architect to design the family tomb on the death of Augustus in 1943 and the carpentry to restore, reassemble and put back in its place the ticket office in 2006.
Just reassembled and relocated, just as it was intended, to be outside between spring and autumn (the exhibition period) and then dismantled and put into storage.
Like a boat in storage during the bad weather: the sails that act as a covering are removed, the three "masts" that support them are dismantled and everything is put away for when the weather is nice.
The lanceolate shape of the roof and the floor plan also recall a small boat, as do the curved wood of the uprights and the curved wood of the counter, which hark back to the nautical world, but even the shelves used by the ticket collectors bring to mind the minimal and essential interiors of a vessel.
Now it is no longer dismantled, during the winter it is covered to protect it.

As with other works by Scarpa, particular attention must be paid to the connections and joints, elements studied ad hoc, almost similar to the imagery of watchmaking, which become an ornament of the artefact and explain how its components behave precisely where they interact with each other.
The slats that support the sail grafted onto the metal structure, the contacts between the concrete base, the wood of the bench and the frameless transparent glass on the “public” front, while it is instead framed and translucent on the service wall, should be read in this sense.
Likewise, the metal hooks and ropes that hold the sails taut, making them easy to dismantle, establish a certain "nautical" dialogue with the wooden coverings that soften the three metal uprights, making them less cold to the touch where people can pass through the turnstile and at the same time protecting the wood from being damaged by the ground, from which it is suspended, and by the rain, from which it is protected with a special cover.

Other references:
https://www.carloscarpa.it/

Read all other articles by the author Claudio Mandelli