Linear stories in Carlo Scarpa's architectural drawings

Architecture and storytelling share a common ground in the activity of world-making. Both are artisans who guide the viewer’s and listener’s imagination into another realm. The storyteller’s architecture is primarily language. The architect’s primary storytelling medium is drawing. Through drawing, an architect guides the viewer’s imagination into another not-yet-real world that is projected much like divinatory practices of reading palms or tarot cards. The magic-real field of facts and fictions coexisting in one realm can be understood as a confabulation. A confabulation brings together both fact and fiction through fārī, a Fable, meaning 'to speak'. In the field of neurology, a mental patient’s confabulation may be when convinces himself that he is in Venice, although he also admits that the town he is seeing through the window is Alexandria. He knows both places, he feels both places and, despite the contradiction, both places constitute his reality. Venetian architect and storyteller par excellence, Carlo Scarpa, exercised the power of confabulations throughout his practice of drawing and building. While architectural historians have attempted to explain Scarpa’s work as layers coming together, very little close reading of the drawings has been made despite the thousands of drawings the architect constructed. Scarpa’s drawings, like confabulations, are places where many realities simultaneously coexist but all constitute one reality in a linear process, linear understood not as a straight, nor predictable. This linearity is closely related to how we live and how stories are made, connecting all the parts despite the apparent contradictions. One could argue that Scarpa, has in fact, only done one drawing in his life, one extremely long drawing, and that one drawing has made him. When the designers of drawings are no longer present to present their story, we must rely on reading the clues from the making of the drawings. This paper deepens into Scarpa’s marks to reveal what has been blindly exposed into the surface of his fabulous drawings