Every year, the RSUA runs the Alan Barnes Scholarship for 3rd Year Undergraduates. The Scholarship offers the opportunity for Architecture students to travel to discover architecture in a destination of their choosing. Find out more about the Alan Barnes Scholarship here.
Earlier this year Josh Cooke, one of two winners of the 2026 scholarship, took a trip to Venice. You can read Josh’s account of the trip below.
In early May, supported by the RSUA Alan Barnes Travelling Scholarship, I travelled to Venice and the Veneto to revisit the work of Carlo Scarpa. I had already visited one of these buildings during a university field trip the previous year, but at the time it felt elusive. I came away with film photographs lost to camera light-leaks, a few hurried sketches, and the feeling that what interested me most remained somewhere just beyond them. The movement of water through Querini Stampalia, the changing weather at the Brion Cemetery and the subtle steppings and ledgings at Castelvecchio are impossible to hold still. Those moments only reveal themselves when watched with patient and willing eyes.
Before travelling I had spent the past few years at university returning repeatedly to Scarpa’s work through books, drawings and photographs, alongside an occasional conversation or two with architect Richard Murphy. I knew the details well enough. I knew several stories. What I did not know was what it felt like to sit down with them for longer than a student cohort tour. The scholarship granted me the opportunity not simply to visit famous buildings, but to slow down within them. To wait out the rain, or the next rumble of thunder. Perhaps await the next person to pass through the scene or return to a particular window or wall again and again.
I did not arrive with a checklist of details to find. Instead, I travelled with an empty sketchbook and around five rolls of film, later updated. Sketching became a way of lingering rather than recording and film photography demanded a second-coming of patience. There was no assurance the photographs would work, only a quiet faith. Looking back, I learnt less from moving between projects than from the moments in between them; delayed trains, long walks, sitting in churches waiting for buses, conversations with strangers and the simple act of remaining somewhere a little longer than first felt necessary.
The approach to drawing Scarpa became unique, but ironically unsurprising. They unfolded across the page, crossed between plan and section, all while wandering into fragments of details before returning to their respective rooms and courtyards again. Often these drawings sat unfinished, resumed later on trains, in cafes or Wetherspoons at Gatwick airport where the buildings continually made me question things I sought to become aware of in the drawing. Looking back these drawings resemble the journey itself more than they depict the architecture.
I expected to come back with photographs: thoughtful reference, reminders should I forget the moments of places, perhaps an architect’s postcard. Instead, over the following months they began explaining the buildings more logically than my time within them. I chose one photograph from each – the museum, the tomb, the gallery and the shop – and found myself writing around them. Not describing the camera’s capture, but everything that seemed to step beyond the frame: weather, waiting, conversations,
anecdotes of history, uncertainty and the things I missed on leaving. Fixed images, continuing to unfold. Quite appropriately, Scarpa.
I arrived in Italy early in the morning and travelled directly to Verona to visit Castelvecchio. It is perhaps Scarpa’s most celebrated project, yet what struck me first was not the iconic details but the struggle of finding a single place to draw it. At San Marco, or standing before a Scamozzi staircase, there was always a position to chose that allowed the building to settle on the page. Castelvecchio refused that entirely. Every time I thought I had found the drawing, another threshold, another fragment of wall or another object quietly insisted on being included, moved closer to, or further from. The building continually pointed beyond itself.
Quickly I stopped resisting. The sketch began to unfold and double back on itself, moving between rooms, details, sections, plans and people until only I really remembered the route it had taken across the page. The drawing seemingly behaved more like the building itself, than the static image I started out for.
The floors fascinated me. Rather than simply connecting galleries they unfolded beneath my feet like fragments of Verona itself, assembled from different shades of local Prun stones, colours and textures. Tiny steps elevated transitions that could easily have been flat. Looking down from the bridge to the foot of the equestrian statue of Cangrande, I noticed a woman quietly sitting on one of these shallow stone lips beneath the monument. It was not a bench, nor an obvious seat, yet she occupied it perfectly. Scarpa had designed for paintings, sculpture and artefacts, but somehow visitors gradually became part of the composition themselves. The nature of the architecture meant we challenged the buildings subtleties as intentionalities and found our exhibited places of pause.
Throughout Castelvecchio I became increasingly aware that the details mattered less in isolation than because of what they sat beside. Frames subdivided rooms, artefacts touched the walls in biographical ways and floors quietly gestured movement. I left impressed by the details, but more by what came next to them.
I mistakenly only packed one roll of film for Verona, so Banco Popolare became only a hurried site drawing before my train. The facade slowly abandoned its apparent regularity as I drew it, while another man in a royal-blue jacket photographed it from across the car park. We exchanged a quiet nod of understanding before leaving, definitely an architect.
The following day I left early for San Vito d’Altivole to visit the Brion Cemetery. The journey itself became unexpectedly memorable. Delayed trains left me waiting alone in a small village church before I eventually caught a packed school bus through the countryside towards the foothills of the Dolomites. By the time I arrived, after travelling down a stretch of “closed road”, I was the cemetery’s only visitor.
Thunder rolled nearby as I approached the famously photographed entrance before relentless rain charged down upon the site. As I sheltered from the thunderstorm, everything began to move around me. The water channels became full, flowing and overflowing, the serenity of the water’s surface brought to life. Rain traced the rough concrete and rolled over glowing glass tiles while dark residual markings travelled down through the walls. Here no photograph could reveal the details as such active participants in the site.
The guide explained that the concrete had been cast into formwork without oil, allowing the grain and knots of the timber to remain permanently visible. The wall carried evidence of another material, remembering the timber. Rain continued to redraw the surface as weather became another author of the cemetery.
Later, returning to the photographs, I found myself repeatedly drawn to one image of the cemetery wall. A month after returning home I began writing around it, trying to understand why it had stayed with me. The notes became less a description of the image than a collection of questions around rain, wall, glass, concrete, timber, light, pattern, method, weather, purpose and the container of it all.
Returning to Venice, I spent a morning at the Fondazione Querini Stampalia. It was the project I thought I understood best, yet it unsettled me the most. The famous photographs of the steps and garden never quite prepare you for how difficult the building is to inhabit. The exhibition space between canal and garden is hollow, cavernous and trapped from light, while the garden resists easy occupation. There are few places to stand back as attention is continually redirected.
I tried to construct the plan, navigating geometries in drawing as I wandered through each room. By the time I reached the garden it was spitting rain, and parts of it disappeared as water caught my ink before it settled on the page. Lines blurred, jumped gaps and reappeared under shelter. This was when I realised the drawing was perhaps the answer to my discomfort in the building. It was never designed for me in the first place.
As I searched for where I belonged, I was continually reminded that water inhabited it with far greater ease. One could say it was designed for Venice. Water entered in ceremony from the canal, moving through troughs at the skirting, disappearing beneath the floor and reappearing through small fountains, channels, crafted drains and larger fountains before returning to the lagoon. Like Castelvecchio, each element passed onto the next as brass received stone, stone received water and water received shadow.
After another afternoon of rain I found shelter beneath the Chiese della Salute at Punta della Dogana, overlooking the Grand Canal towards distant San Marco. While drawing an American tourist appeared under a cloud of weed to sit beside me on what was barely a seat, the skirting ledge that was giving me heavy pins and needles as I balanced myself and my sketchbook in equilibrium. He took Polaroids and laughed that every photo here had already been taken; people were simply carrying unoriginal views home in their suitcases. Instead, he had started photographing people taking photographs. Around twenty minutes later he left, taking a picture of me drawing, to be titled he could have just taken a photo.
Afterwards I did take the photo, partly lost to light leaking. The interaction stayed with me as a reminder of why I did not just take photographs. Drawing was never really about making a drawing. It asked for time, invited conversations, interruptions and the things photographs rarely hold onto: the first drops of rain before anyone notices it’s raining, the changing tide against the edges of the city, the conversations washing through the piazzas.
After it dried I left and noticed the old tidal observatory at the edge of the water. I could not help thinking about Rossi’s Teatro del Mondo, which it resembled so closely and is so often photographed from almost the same point across the lagoon. Whether coincidence or not, the two structures became connected in my memory: the permanent recording device of Venice and the temporary theatre of performance.
The last major Scarpa stopping was the Olivetti Showroom beneath the arcades of Piazza San Marco. One of his smallest projects, compressed into a narrow space beneath the density and policy of Venice, yet it gave me the most questions for the longest.
I tried to draw the façade and the inside, but the place was too small to feel able to stop in, so the drawing was left incomplete—too exposed, too busy and too large to hide within. Two days later, during a four-hour layover at Gatwick Airport, I returned to the page in Wetherspoons, still trying to untangle why the showroom affected me. I questioned the right-hand entrance wall: first it seemed like a logo, then a plan of the shop, then a fragment of Venice. The brass shifted through the stone like labyrinthine Venetian streets, describing the city beyond the showroom while simultaneously holding its own small world.
The drawing followed me home because the building itself had escaped being completed in a single visit:
2 days later I used the memory of the Brion and Castelvecchio patchwork to help curate the wall of sketches at the ESALA Degree Show.
1 week later I developed the six rolls of film myself, scanning four at a time.
8 days later they were pinned to the walls of the Front Room Studio residency beside sketchbooks and precious throwaways of trace.
That same day I realised I had forgotten the undeveloped seventh roll of Querini at the bottom of my bag.
1 month later I found myself writing lists around the photographs, the stories, the weather and the constructions. A few days later this began laying the groundwork for my dissertation.
I’m sure in time they will become something else again.
While collecting photographs and encounters with places and people, perhaps what I learnt most was that architecture does not always reveal itself when we first encounter it. Sometimes it requires the patient witness to wait, return and draw again, or simply allow the uncertainty to remain for the next author. For that opportunity, I am sincerely grateful to the RSUA and the Alan Barnes Travelling Scholarship.
