His architecture was an antidote to the era’s brazen showiness: subtle and natural instead of flashy and proudly artificial. Although he built a handful of private homes and public buildings from the ground up, his reputation was made by his reimaginings of centuries-old museums — commissions others might have scorned as too constrained by the past — in the process of which he created a road map for both honoring history and transcending it.

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If Scarpa is less well known today than his contemporaries, it’s perhaps because he did virtually all his work in and around Venice — the country’s most tradition-bound big city, as opposed to avant-garde Milan. But there is another reason: His oeuvre was built, in part, by burying his ego. By most accounts understated, meticulously gracious and profoundly well read (his large library was always open to his friends), he wasn’t one to worry about his legacy or the enduring purity of his creations. ‘‘He believed in the elegance of incompletion,’’ says Robert McCarter, author of a 2013 Scarpa monograph. ‘‘He wasn’t afraid of his work being added to in the future. He understood that everything was essentially dynamic.’’

FOR SCARPA, Venice was the cradle of civilization. He was born there in 1906 to a schoolteacher father, and spent his childhood in and around the city. After graduating from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts — he never bothered to sit for the architect’s licensing exam and was usually referred to with the honorific of ‘‘professore’’ instead of ‘‘architetto’’ — he spent 15 years of his career at the Venini glassworks in Murano, where he was design director. Throughout, he maintained a nearly religious belief that his Modernist sensibility could be braided together with the city’s Gothic past and its charming, slightly askew symmetry.