Poetic Emergence and Insight from the Trace of the “Line”: A Reading on Carlo Scarpa’s Castelvecchio Museum Drawings

Abstract

This study aims to trace the line and to conduct a discussion about poetics as it arises from the trace or drawing of that line. The study, therefore, considers the act of drawing as a thinking practice and explores the dynamic relationship between “line”, “the act of drawing”, and “drawing” through sketches. This study is based on the qualitative research method that discusses the conceptual relationship between language and poetry. This relationship is crossed with not-language and not-poetry and is explained through the approach of “poetic emergence” and “poetic insight”. A sample analysis is made through the concepts of “dream, image, and affectivity”, which are generated from this approach. The study’s sample group is the selected sketches of Carlo Scarpa’s Castelvecchio Museum. These sketches have been evaluated using the content analysis technique. The tracking of the line reveals a personal journey that includes the image, dream, and affectivity. Although Scarpa’s dialogue with the designer of the Castelvecchio Museum sketches has ended, their dialogue with its observer continues. At the end of the sketches’ reading, one makes inferences on emotions. These emotions, which derive from an ambiguous world of dreams and images, have created moments of “poetic emergence”, while poetic emergence and its moments of emergence have created the “poetic understanding”, which is personally internalized. Since the moments of poetic emergence and understanding arose from each other, they have not been revealed themselves in a specific order, but in a reticulated cycle flowing into each other. Subjecting the study to a subjective evaluation process has created limitations in the context of the content of the qualitative research method. The study, which unfolds over the poetics, is valuable as it discusses the intangible dimensions of architecture through the line standing at the intersection of the material and the immaterial.