Perpetual Piazza
Page Comeaux
Piazza d’Italia’s mechanistic makeup and fragile finishes have necessitated protracted contracts of care with varying degrees of formality. Since its 1978 opening, the stewardship of several caretakers have continually redefined its meaning. Often referred to as a postmodern ruin, the monumentality actively generated by its caretakers is distinct from that of the ancient Roman structures that the Piazza resembles. More akin to American graveyards, which agree to care for their occupants’ remains in perpetuity, writer J.B. Jackson affirms that “the public graveyard is a reminder of duties constantly recurring; in the true meaning of the word, it is a monument, a ‘bringing to mind.’” This distinction is important to dwell on, as Charles Moore’s design does not derive its monumentality from its contrived Italian aesthetics—the fluted columns, the rounded arches, and the classical orders—but rather from the fragility of its constituent parts and the inherent care required to maintain their appearance.
Years before pieces of the Piazza came together on site, Moore established his position on monumentality in a 1965 essay for Yale’s Perspecta. In the essay, he methodically searches California’s burgeoning urban centers for exceptional works of monumental architecture, honing in on Disneyland as the focus of his analysis. Before embarking on this ambitious journey with the reader, Moore indicates his obligation to define the operative word in a way that would justify his inevitable fixation on Disney’s Magic Kingdom. “Monumentality,” he writes, “is not a product of compositional techniques (such as symmetry about several axes), rather, a function of the society’s taking possession of or agreeing upon extraordinarily important places on the Earth’s surface,” which occurs “when something is given over by people to the public.” With this clarification, Moore frees monuments from antiquated associations with physical form, tellurian tectonics, and presupposed permanence, opening up a corporeal understanding of how they are conceived of, engaged with, and tended to.
When the architect visited Disneyland in the 1960s, its featured attractions were themselves freed from the constraints of politics, history, and time. A well-maintained facsimile of an imagined American ideal, park-goers strolled down a fantastical early twentieth-century Main Street empowered by its ability to depend upon—and thus to garner—assiduous care. Moore fondly recalls that in Disneyland “everything works, the way it doesn’t seem to anymore in the world outside…fountains play, tiny bulbs light the trees at night, and everything is clean.” With this precedent in mind, it stands to reason that the architect’s ambitions for Piazza d’Italia would be equally idealistic. In theory, this monument need not be sturdy enough to last millenia, like the Roman Forum; veneration and preservation would ideally go hand-in-hand.
Moore set out to design a contemporary monument against the backdrop of this theoretical framework, reflected in the gleaming stainless steel column capitals that accent its archways. Ionic orders were hollowed out to accommodate piping and fountain manifolds that flow into the scaled-down Adriatic Sea below. Corinthian orders were to be adorned with leaves rendered spectacularly in illuminated neon gas that cast the Italian peninsula in a soft, polychromatic glow. The capabilities afforded by advanced materials and construction methods enabled a fragile assemblage of classical architecture that harnessed the three states of matter—a retro-futuristic portrait hung upon a concealed, yet conventional, steel substructure. But the fragility that would ideally ensure the requisite maintenance to keep its myriad systems operational would soon transition to care with a different characteristic. By the time the architect visited his mortus monumentum five years after its opening, he remarked upon the attention that the unhoused—the only regular occupants of the Piazza—paid to it. Attempting to rhetorically smooth over its failure to garner the desired level of maintenance to keep its fountains playing and its lights lit, Moore nevertheless heralded the Piazza’s success, claiming that its design was flexible enough to accommodate even those who exist outside of the prevailing economic order.
But Piazza d’Italia is a successful monument, albeit not in the way it was framed by Moore. When its façades began to decay, they excelled in bringing to mind the societal conditions responsible for their dilapidated state, eventually exposing both the internal structure of the now-demolished campanile and the internal contradictions of capital accumulation. Graffitied rather than glowing, this once-monument to New Orleans’ Italian immigrants became a monument to the city’s neglect of the unhoused community that began to reside there. The Piazza’s decade of decline, in which the decision not to further develop the site with a hotel and shops was made, became a tangible indicator of divestment from the city during a period of white flight to its suburbs, along with economic shifts from social spending to privatization in line with the logic of Reaganomics. When the city eventually halted funding for professionalized maintenance of the Piazza, it turned to incarcerated caretakers from the Orleans Parish Prison, who were outfitted in bright yellow uniforms to beautify the space each Spring for the occasion of St. Joseph’s Day; forced labor in the care of a fountain dedicated to the patron saint of workers—a monument both sacred and profane.
The deterioration of Piazza d’Italia in concert with the cessation of professionalized maintenance suggests that public goods directly reflect the manner in which they are cared for. The title of Moore’s essay on monumentality, You Have to Pay for the Public Life, seems to concur, yet the real-world application of that dictum leaves open the question of who is left to pay the price. Monumentalizing a transactional relationship is most problematic when it acts to reinforce a society’s most harmful conditions. In considering goods that benefit the broader public, like housing, healthcare and education, applying the concept of monument-from-care may be a legitimate path to arriving at some comparable veneration for those ideals, thereby monumentalizing care and compassion rather than indigence and incarceration. While the fragility of Moore’s monument induces a great deal of veneration from those who value its unique qualities, its primary reliance upon institutional care for survival may hold the greatest potential for failure. Thus the architect’s visage, molded into water-spouting medallions, challenges us to consider how to collectively care for the things that we cherish in a manner that actively bolsters their longevity.
(1) Jackson, John Brinckerhoff. “From Monument to Place.” Landscape in Sight: Looking at America, edited by Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 1997, pp. 164.
(2) Moore, Charles. “You Have to Pay for the Public Life.” Perspecta 9/10: The Yale Architectural Journal, Robert A.M. Stern, The MIT Press, 1965, pp. 57-106.
(3) Ibid
(4) See Ten Years Later.
