ABSTRACT
Architecture and storytelling share a common ground in the activity of world-making. Both are artisans who guide the viewer’s and listener’s imagination into another realm. The storyteller’s architecture is primarily language. The architect’s primary storytelling medium is drawing. Through drawing, an architect guides the viewer’s imagination into another not-yet-real world that is projected much like divinatory practices of reading palms or tarot cards. When architects are no longer present to tell their story, we must rely on reading the clues from the making of their drawings. The relationship between hand and mind, a duality often recited by Leon Battista Alberti, is subtly negotiated here by Frascari. The red line, like Ariadne’s clue, that appears to join head to hand is actually discontinuous. The drawing’s full title is “Scarpa Confabulation” and it identifies the aquiline eagle-like-nosed individual shown in profile as the famous Venetian architect Carlo Scarpa, with whom Frascari taught and worked.
