Just a guy passionate about architecture | sharing my thoughts
Joined February 2026
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In 1968, Carlo Scarpa was asked to design a private cemetery for a couple, the Brions, on a plot beside the town cemetery of San Vito d'Altivole.
He gave them two rings.
Two full circles of poured concrete, tilted toward each other,their ceilings almost touching at one point.
Every threshold gets a step, a groove, a change of material — concrete meeting stucco meeting water meeting grass — because he believed a body should feel itself crossing from one condition into another, arriving somewhere rather than just walking through.
When Scarpa died in 1978,he asked to be buried standing at the edge of the site he'd built, facing the tomb, wrapped in a shroud in the old local custom,at its threshold.The man who spent a career designing careful crossings chose, at the end, to become one.
#architecture #scarpa
In 1929, Mies van der Rohe built a pavilion designed to be knocked down within the year — and Barcelona spent the next fifty years missing it enough to rebuild it from photographs.
The German Pavilion for that year's International Exposition had no purpose beyond existing.
What survived was a handful of black/white photographs,and one low tubular-steel chair Mies had designed for a king's visit, which outlived the room it was built for by half a century.Architecture books kept reprinting those photographs until Barcelona decided they were outdated.
In 1986,the city rebuilt the pavilion on its original foundations.The building everyone now calls a masterpiece of modern architecture is, technically, younger than the chair still inside it.
#architecture #barcelona
In 1910, Adolf Loos gave Vienna a building it didn't know how to forgive.
The Looshaus stands on Michaelerplatz,facing the Hofburg Palace across the square.Below street level,Loos gave the city what it expected:green Cipollino marble,Doric half-columns,real weight and luxury.
Loos wasn't improvising austerity. In those same years he was arguing, in essays and lectures, that ornament belonged to an earlier stage of culture — something a modern building, like a modern man, should have already outgrown.
He never won the argument outright. He won a compromise instead: flower boxes, forced onto his windowsills so the street would have something to look at.The building that scandalized an empire is now one of the most quietly photographed corners in Vienna.
#Vienna #architecture
In 1957, Jørn Utzon won the competition to design the Sydney Opera House with a sketch of sails on a harbor — and no real idea how to build them.
For years his engineers at Ove Arup tried shape after shape: parabolas, ellipsoids, a different custom curve for every shell.
In 1927, Eileen Gray built a table that has outlived nearly every argument about who deserves credit for modernism.
