Palimpsest. It has to be one of the most glorious words in the English language- at least to me. It is all due to my discovery of and admiration for a single man. Well, two, if you count the person that ‘introduced’ me to the aforementioned single man. That man is Carlo Scarpa.

Early in my architecture education, and even now in some cases, one of the scariest things to encounter is blank media. A single sheet of cold press watercolor paper. A torn piece of 18# trace paper. Sturdy textural canvas.

As long as I did not ‘do’ anything to produce an architectural solution to a given design problem, I could play it safe by never committing to anything. The fear of never finding the right solution gripped me a spiral of indecision after indecision. It seemed that I was caught in a vicious circle of wanting to craft beautiful base buildings and interior spaces, without having to ruin the selected media with graphite smears, charcoal, and pesky erasure crumbs. Bye-bye, perfection. Or so I thought.

Enter, Signore Scarpa. Museo di Castelvecchio. Fondazione Querini Stampalia. Olivetti Showroom. Brion Cemetery.

From the first time I saw the layered, colorfully animated and incomplete sketches of this Italian master builder, I was completely and deliriously in love. Progressions of lines revealed as deep thoughts, cultivated over and over on canary tracing paper or a crisp white sheet-each thought being not necessarily a mistake, but a mode of exploration- tell a story of his design process. Sometimes there are sweeping strokes, or sometimes there are little vignettes that invite the viewer into Scarpa’s deeply creative mind.

His imperfect perfect drawings stir me with inspiration. With each new design opportunity, being able to see every one of my mistakes compressed on a single sheet is a chance for me to quickly see new (or what would have been otherwise undiscovered) possibilities.

Mistakes, I learned, are for making. Making drawings. Making buildings. Perhaps though, most of all, making is for mistakes.

Mistakes Are For Making