Carlo Scarpa is a master of the twentieth century, one of the best known and most studied modern architects. The bibliography on him is extensive, the critical fortune is enormous, his works are classics. Born and raised in Venice, Scarpa was an architect, a designer and an erudite lecturer, open to contemporary ideas but at the same time attentive to the shapes of traditional culture, both European and Far Eastern, of which he was passionate about.

His legacy is unquestionable: although he left no theoretical production, his works continue to inspire designers and architects, attracted by an endless heritage of shapes, by his irony, but above all by a way of conceiving architecture that sees air, light and colors as expressive tools on a par with building materials.If his academic training had a decisive weight in the development of his poetics, equally important was his work with glass, first as artistic consultant to the MVM Cappellin & C. glassware shop, then, from 1932 to 1947, to Venini, for which he studied vases, objects, lamps and lighting fixtures. For a company like Incalmi, born in Murano in the glass environment, Scarpa's work is a constant inspiration. Marino Barovier's book, "Carlo Scarpa. Glass of an Architect", is always on our desks, but the works created in Venice and in the Veneto region are also essential.

Venice is indeed a kind of open-air scarpian museum. Starting with Fondazione Querini Stampalia (1959-63), a perfect example of the mingling of the material and the immaterial: in the entrance atrium, passages and tunnels let water into the building, making the sea an architectural element, on a par with steps and pools. In Giardini della Biennale, Scarpa is credited with the designs for the Giardino delle Sculture in the Italian Pavilion (1950-52), an intimate, poetic and quiet interior inspired by the Orient, and the Venezuela Pavilion (1953-56). And it is in the Olivetti store in St. Mark's Square (1957- 1958) that we understand what is meant by architecture as "visual art." The rooms are paved with colored tiles of marble and Murano glass, interspersed with white and polished stone: due to the effect of light, colors become lighter as you move away from the windows.