Although the Borgo apartment building is a new building, it once again proves Scarpa’s mastery in placing new buildings in a historical environment. The apartment building adjoins the block of flats on one side and opens onto a garden with mature trees at the other end. Already during the design process, Scarpa encountered territorial regulations and the client’s whims. In 1974, an investor invited Scarpa to work with a local engineer whose project had already received a building permit from the city authorities. Scarpa originally designed a slender mass that matched the street line, leaving the remainder of the plot as a garden. The city authorities approved the project on August 20, 1975, but Scarpa did not see the completion of his only apartment building.

The house has undergone a number of changes over time. The four-story building was originally finished with a roof terrace accessible to all residents of the building, but later this area was stopped (with a hipped roof) for additional apartments. In the same way, the facade had a pinkish “marmorino” color, but today it is painted white (the color has also been washed away by the rain and turned gray).

In the basement, which is accessed via a ramp in the western part of the house, there are also eight cellar cubicles in addition to parking spaces. The south-facing facade is set back slightly from the street line, which creates a noise-filtering front garden, and a concrete pergola also shades the ground floor. The main entrance to the house is also sunken, introducing visitors to a Japanese garden with a water feature, sculptural ceiling and brick paving with concrete voids, creating a delicate dotted decor. The red-painted steel capitals of the columns and lintels have an artistically rendered detail. The stair hall lies just beyond the entrance semi-enclosed garden. The path leads diagonally to the center of the layout, from where on each floor you enter two generously designed (up to seven-room) apartments from the main landing. Asymmetrically spaced French windows occasionally complement the prefabricated reinforced concrete balconies with Scarpa’s characteristic jagged decor in the places of the drainage outlet. The separation of the individual floors on the facade was carried out using continuous concrete strips at the level of the crown.

Although the house was completed only after Scarpa’s death, it is not his last realization, as the Villa Palazzetto in Monselica remained similarly under construction, and was completed by his son Tobia Scarpa in 2006, almost four decades later.

Text provided by the architect.

Everything in this project nestled in the hills of Valpolicella tells of the beauty that coexists with ingenuity. Everything speaks, paraphrasing Scarpa’s own words, of a conception of architecture as harmony, like a beautiful woman’s face, mysterious, difficult to understand and, at the same time, marvelous. The terms that make up this intricate language are the access to the villa, a crack at the same level as the roof, from which the underground rooms take light, to the floor organized in slopes that follow the slope; the surfaces of the windows which, reflecting the pools of water (a typical compositional element of Scarpa’s architecture), multiply the walls of the house, as happens in Venetian palaces, the nine giant cylindrical pillars, built with concrete, Prun and Trani stone , which support the canopy, shape the living room and underline the changes in height between living areas, kitchen, dining room and bathroom that otherwise seem without a separation. Villa Ottolenghi is a unique construction, a perfect example of how Scarpa is able to channel the relationship between natural, artificial nature and human life into his work.