Week 2 – Spaces That Speak – Isabelle Cloeter

During my class trip to Treviso and Venice this week from Milan, I found myself unexpectedly pulled back to my first semester in college in the school of architecture. As I stepped into the Brion Cemetery in Treviso and the elegant store of Otivelli in Venice, I was struck by the memory of Professor Snyder’s lecture in my Design 1 studio, learning about Tadao Ando’s Azuma House. 

Back then, the Azuma House felt abstract: a stark concrete box in Osaka with a courtyard that was caved in the center. But the words that Professor Snyder lectured to my studio stuck with me, how Ando used materials and space not just for the safety and shelter of a home but to create a feeling. That conversation gave me a thought in my head, architecture has a purpose to make an emotional and sensory experience whether we realize it or not. Architects are store tellers for individuals that walk through space. 

Now a few years later, walking through the layered textures of Carlo Scarpa’s work from the craftsmanship of the Otivelli storefront to the spiritual geometry of the Brion Cemetery. I felt my ideas come full circle. Scarpa and Ando are from different cultures and time periods, but they slightly overlap. Both used architecture as a medium of silence, reflection, storytelling and material poetry. 

Each space is very different from a commercial store, cemetery and home all invite you to slow down and take a moment to enjoy the moment in the quiet space. The Olivelli store, while in one of the most fast paced areas in Venice, finds a way to make a retail space be intimate and slow paced. The Brio Cemetery has flowing water, thresholds that are gentle and areas to sit and reflect. The Azuma house, though I have never visited in person, during Professor Snyders lecture I could feel a sense like I was in space based on the way he talked about the calm and elevated space. All three of these spaces use light, texture, materiality and spatial rhythm to connect the body with the mind. You feel these spaces when you walk through them. 

Those two days in Venice and Treviso reminded me of why I fell in love with design and how many spaces, while from different times and areas of the country, can both tell a story. Architecture has the ability to hold memory, to speak across many time and spaces, and to shape how we see the world around us.