Scarpa - Language of Venice : Grills

Scarpa, Querini Stampalia (Author)

Rio Madonna dell'Orto (Google Maps)

Scarpa, Olivetti Showroom (Author)

F.te Gasparo Contarini (Author)

The threshold of within and without.
Venetian buildings are accessed both by land and crucially, by water.

The grill permits light and resists theft.

To enter the building through the watergate is to transport between worlds, evoking classical themes of Orpheus' entry to Hades, or Dante's passage to the Inferno. Likewise too, the admittance of the accused to the Tower of London via the Traitors' Gate.

https://youtu.be/EcRFFmgVGlc?t=2979

The passage from the water to the land, from the undulating to the fixed; the intangible to the palpable.

It is from the water that Venice has acrued its wealth, a wealth which still flows by the tide.

Where the iron meets the water, a miraculous interplay of properties happens.

To quote Bachelard:

'In fact, as soon as two elementary substances unite and become fused with each other, they take on sexual properties. Where the imagination is concerned, for two substances to be opposite is for them to be of the opposite sex. If two matters with feminine tenderness, like water and earth, mingle, well then! one of them becomes slightly masculine in order to dominate its partner. Only when this occurs can the combination be solid and durable, only then can the imaginary combination be a real image. In the realm of the material imagination, every union is a marriage, and there is no marriage a trois.'

Bachelard, 'Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter' (2006), p. 95

Scarpa, Water Entrance at Querini Stampalia (Author)