Natalie Guy, The Staircase, 2024
Powder-coated steel and macrocarpa posts.
Italian architect Carlo Scarpa first gained prominence for renovating crumbling Venetian buildings by integrating modern materials and details—a trim of glass tiles here, a floating staircase or brass handrail there. Users felt they were moving through time as well as space. In 2022, visiting Scarpa’s projects in Venice, Natalie Guy’s attention was snagged by his staircases. She began scouring books and the internet for images, finding a design for a slender brass railing that turned a sharp 360 degrees around the corner of a stone staircase. The design, it turned out, was not by Scarpa at all, but by Act Romegialli—a contemporary design studio founded in 1996. Guy was drawn to her moment of misrecognition as a sign of modernism’s enduring influence on architectural design. The Staircase paraphrases Act Romegialli’s handrail design as a sculptural object, invoking Scarpa’s spectre on Waiheke, where many modernist-style residencies can be found, perhaps bearing his influence without knowing it. Her staircase leads nowhere, just for show.
