The water line. The monument to the Partisan woman by Carlo Scarpa in Venice

Abstract

This research focuses on the study of the monument to the Partisana that Carlo Scarpa made in Venice between 1964 and 1968, a base consisting of 83 pieces of concrete and stone, which served as the basis for the bronze sculpture of a recumbent woman by Augusto Murer. The set of prisms is analyzed from three points of view: the geometry, with the repetition of equal pieces and the implantation of a variable grid in plan and section; the construction system, characterized by the assembly of concrete and stone in each one of the pieces and, finally, the changing perception of the monument due to the water level oscillations of the Venetian lagoon. Scarpa moves away in this work of the most sophisticated or rhetorical details, to which we are accustomed, to offer a precise system of pure geometric elements that expresses the relationship between architecture and nature and reflects in a poetic way the passage of time.