PiazzaD'Italia

the Piazza d'Italia in New Orleans, designed by Charles Moore, is one of the few icons of Postmodern architecture that isn't a building, and is next in our summer season on Postmodernism.

Both a memorial and a public space, the piazza is a manifestation of Moore's ideas of an "inclusive" architecture, which can speak to and be enjoyed by anyone. Moore's design, however, immediately attracted both fans and detractors, and many saw his architectural populism as pure kitsch.Completed in 1978, the piazza was conceived as an urban redevelopment project and a memorial to the city's Italian citizens – past and present. The contributions of the Italian community had been largely overshadowed by those of the French, Spanish, African and Native Americans, according to the Italian-American community leaders that commissioned the project.

Moore took a highly pictorial approach to designing his urban plaza. Colonnades, arches and a bell tower are arranged in a curving formation around a fountain. The layers of structures are brightly coloured, trimmed in neon and metallics, and ornamented with various classical orders. The paved surface of the plaza is equally embellished and textured. Light and shadows play across the surface of the plaza, and views through the various openings create a complex spatial experience for visitors moving through the colonnades. Uplighting and neon accents animate the space at night.While other Postmodernists – as they would later be known – like Michael Graves and Philip Johnson used classical elements to poke fun at Modernist orthodoxy, to telegraph knowing commentary or even jokes to architectural insiders, Moore insisted his colourful, cartoonish piazza was a joyful tribute. It was a monument to the achievements of Italians, so it references Italian culture directly – the country's architecture, urbanism, and geography are all represented.Opinions about the design are sharply divided. The intricate drawings for the then unbuilt project won a Progressive Architecture award in 1976. In his 1993 obituary for Moore, New York Times critic Herbert Muschamp called the project a "festive agglomeration of semi-circular colonnades, neon arches and fountains". And Charles Birnbaum, president of the Cultural Landscape Foundation, told Dezeen the piazza is a "seminal Postmodern landscape".

Others are not so convinced. Writing in Landscape Architecture Magazine in 2004, the commentator Allen Freemen wittily characterised it as "like one of those fruity, rummy Hurricane cocktails that you sip through a straw from a curvy glass garnished with an orange slice and maraschino cherry: colourful, over the top, and made of questionable ingredients". Sounds like a recipe for an architectural hangover.
Moore's agenda for Postmodernism in architecture was inclusive and democratic. While Aldo Rossi wanted his buildings to resonate with memory, and Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown wanted their buildings to communicate, Moore wanted his buildings to inspire joy and connect to everyday people.The website of the American Italian Cultural Center, which is located adjacent to the piazza, characterises it thus: "Great Architecture tends to inspire admiration reverence, humility, awe, and other such solemn emotions. But rarely does it fill its beholder with feelings of happiness, joy, warmth, and love. The Piazza d'Italia is one of those exceptions… [it] forms an ensemble of unqualified pleasure and delight, the perfect expression of the gloria di vita that is characteristically Italian as the vocabulary of form and colours that make this such a deeply evocative place."
Born in 1923, Moore graduated from the University of Michigan in 1943 and went on to study at Princeton, where he earned a Masters and PhD. Moore was a polymath: an architect and planner, a prolific writer, and teacher. He was also a nomad. After a period as a teaching assistant for Louis Khan at Princeton, he taught at Berkley, Yale, the University of California and there University of Texas, setting up different architecture firms as he moved around.

His writing and academic life clearly informed his architecture. Perhaps the figures that Moore is most closely entwined with aesthetically and philosophically, and with whom he shared affinities and differences, are Venturi and Scott Brown. Their writing appeared together in a seminal 1965 issue of Perspecta, Yale's architecture journal, edited by then student Robert A M Stern.Venturi contributed an excerpt of Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, which would go on to be one of the most important treatises of architectural Postmodernism. Moore put forward the brief essay You Have to Pay for the Public Life, his best-known piece of writing. Both texts drew on vernacular, popular, and commercial buildings as sources for architectural investigation.