(Re)Drawing to Find Out

On Carlo Scarpa's Brion Cemetery

Cotonificio, aula L2

Conference by Enrico Miglietta

The lecture presents a research-by-drawing inquiry into Carlo Scarpa’s Brion Cemetery (Altivole, 1968–78), developed as part of a PhD conducted between Politecnico di Milano and KU Leuven, completed in 2024. It uses drawing as a means of entering the work from within — starting full-scale, from the joint as a point of onset, and moving progressively outward through parts and fragments toward the whole.

Through this process, the lecture uncovers the tacit knowledge embedded in the work, the design strategies that underpin the project’s coherence: a material-based economy of means, a principle of tectonic legibility, and a proportional grammar rooted in the act of making rather than in abstract compositional systems.

The central argument is that in Scarpa’s work, the search for expression is always grounded in a careful mastery of technique, and that the poetry of the Brion Cemetery begins with the obsessive act of deciding how one element meets another. The lecture proposes this as a transferable method: a way of engaging architecture through drawing that remains as relevant today as it was in Scarpa's hands.

The conference is offered as part of the studio “Architecture, Interior and Creative Exhibition Design” taught by Guido Morpurgo, Massimiliano Scarpa, and Dario Trabucco, with Giovanni Perrucci, within the MA Architecture programme.

Image: Enrico Miglietta, Abacus of Joining Elements. Re-drawing after Carlo Scarpa’s Brion Cemetery (Altivole, 1968–78). Pencil on paper, 1285 × 875 mm, 1:1. 2024