Translated to English, it means “The Garden of Lost Footsteps”, another architecture work by Peter Eisenman. Located on the garden of the Museo di Castelvecchio, on the lawn in front of the castle’s inner facade, it is a medieval military fortification known for its historically authentic early ‘60s renovation by Carlo Scarpa. The Castelvecchio installation came out of the Eisenman’s interest in the working processes of some of the greatest 20^th century architects, of particular importance is his interpretation of Giuseppe Terragni’s work, and his concern to sites that are rich with history, where events from various periods are layered and intertwined.

The museum was rebuilt after WWII, and Eisenman’s installation attracts inspiration from, and reacts to, Scarpa’s design. He also quoted from many of his own past works. Typical of Eisenman’s work, Il Giardino dei Passi Perduti is laid out on a shifted grid and expands in many directions as well as reaching into the museum building. Since the 1970s and ‘80s, the museum site has encouraged a creative dialogue between works of contemporary art and the monument itself.

The conceptual origin of the plan lies in an awareness of the ‘slightness’ of the wall (decked out in false antique in the 1920s) that separates the sequence of Scarpa’s big exhibition rooms on the ground floor from the garden. This wall was seen by Peter Eisenman as if it were an abstract diaphragm, which allows him to bring the internal rooms into contact with the same number of external piazze-rooms he set in the garden.

In this way the five big exhibition rooms and the same number of external piazze establish a dialogue between positive and negative, a respond in plan to the rooms of the lower Gallery of the Scaliger castle. Furthermore, a second set of piazze are oriented on the axis of the tower and Scarpa’s famous pivoted bridge, so that the two systems intersect. These exhibition rooms’ intersections are up to 20 centimeters in depth and lined with steel plate.

On a sliding axis over these are variously sloping volumes, also made of steel, that contain flooring that echoes that inside the Gallery. The Garden of Lost Footsteps reflects on Scarpa’s project by placing at-scale replicas of his striated concrete floors in the garden as if they were medieval artifacts, then cracking them open to reveal new sculptures. The surrounding dunes of organic terrain, internally formed with metal structures that soften its outline, are up to about 1.20 metres in height and surfaced with rolls of turf. A grid arranged in this suite of piazze then appears in fragments, or spirit-sculptures, that emerge in the thin gap between the floors and walls in Scarpa’s exhibition rooms.

In this dialogue between Peter Eisenman and Scarpa, a well-rooted “critical architecture” is overlaid by the thin, light, but very important connection of a “poetic architecture”. He chose an apparently secondary and trivial element of Scarpa’s plan: the striped lines on the floor drawn by the Venetian architect across the visitor’s route, give a dynamic, almost syncopated rhythm to the succession of museum events. Eisenman ‘felt’ the essence of these white lines on the floor: they are the idea, implicit in Scarpa that the museum does not finish there, enclosed in those walls, but that it extends outside its shell, into the city, into the atmosphere, into history.

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