Walt Lockley

House of the Nutty Professor

Piazza d'Italia, New Orleans, Louisiana

The first question about the Piazza d'Italia is where is it, and there's no good clear answer easy for that. It can be found off Poydras Street close to the river, close to the downtown casino, but tucked behind away in a corner where you're not likely to see it, recently adopted and refurbished by the Loew's luxury hotel (which itself may need some adoption) for a million dollars but not even visible from the hotel. There's a sign on Poydras but you have to mean to find it.

Next question, what is it good for.

That's not clear good or simple either. Part of Loew's deal was that they could use this public park for parties a few nights every year. Otherwise it's open for the public to, er, uh, enjoy. If it was meant to be functional by promoting (or addressing) civic pedestrian street life, that's ironic, in one of the handful of American cities with a vibrant street life and a sense of humor, it's really not that far from the corner of Bourbon and Canal where there's plenty of vibrant street life, if by 'vibrant' you mean 'gawking at strippers and vomiting up oyster sandwiches', but nobody wanders over here. And if they did, they wouldn't like it. The Piazza is totally not in sync with the titties-and-beer-bong vibe from Bourbon Street or any other authentic vibe, healthy or not, in New Orleans. The Piazza also has a sense of humor but it's a different kind of smart-ass sense of humor and it's even facing the wrong direction. C'mon. It faces an alley.

Next question, why should we care.

Well, the place has a certain architectural significance. (Oh boy, you're thinking, here we go.) It's an early (1978) prize-winning example of bold postmodernism: colors, distortions of scale, playful massing, unconventional combinations of materials, complicated waterworks. This was shocking and delightful at the time and less delightful now.

Now you can get bold postmodernism in Vegas by the yard, and get all you want (in fact) across the street at the casino. The color scheme and that sense of bold-gaiety-past-its-expiration-date has a lot in common with Horton Plaza in San Diego. It's old hat. So that's not why we care. If we do.

This Piazza d'Italia is a tricky place, an urban puzzle. There are plenty of technical, architectural in-jokes coded into this place. These curved concentric colonnades, five of them, represent the five classical orders of architecture (Doric, Ionic, Corinthian, Tuscan, and Composite) in proper order with the proper capitals, and there's a sixth stylized colonnade in front, the red one, that this nutty and self-involved design architect called The Delicatessen Order (tee hee) but could be called the "Ironic" Order or "Dorky" Order because, look closely, you'll see air quotes around all this postmodernist cleverness.

Hard to tell from these photos but that black and white speakers' platform stands in the dead center of the space, the locus marked by the bulls-eye pavement, which tends to organize the space without you being aware of it, one of those devious subliminal architectural effects. And those funny irregular platforms in the fountain coming out from the middle - oh, look, it's Italy. It's a 70-foot-long stylized relief map of Italy. For the Piazza d'Italia. Right. That pulpit stands on Sicily, and I understand 95% of the Italians in New Orleans, the Italians who would use this plaza, are Sicilian.

Probably ten or twelve other clever references and homages in here that sail over my head.

I don't know about you but these in-jokes are a little annoying. Good-humored, yes. Kind of vulgar, yes. Aimed at the general public, no.

Mostly what makes me care about the Piazza d'Italia is sympathy and respect for the architect, a guy who believed in spectacle and a carnival atmosphere, a guy who loved loud design features, loud eye-damaging color combinations, supergraphics, excessive stylistic collisions, funny scale, and constantly borrowing esoteric historical design solutions and allusions from his extensive (and irresponsible) trips to Mykonos and Mexico City and Pasadena and Cordoba etc, and the equally irresponsible use of materials like plastic, mylar, platinum tiles, and neon. This guy's architecture is always arousing, demands your attention and sometimes tips straight over into kitsch.

This is the architect, right here. Charles Willard Moore. THE BASTARD! (Just kidding.)

Moore is better. That could have been his motto. He's spitting out Good Times! Wait that's Coors Light he's spitting! Get a plastic cup!

Moore had done a lot of important work with the landscape architect Lawrence Halprin, the man who invented the playable urban fountain, and he loved water effects. As in the Ira Keller Fountain, there are fun moments here where you don't trust your own sense of privilege, you're not sure if you're allowed to step onto these slippery surfaces, are you allowed to do this? Colorful, happy, good for summer kids.

But there's Moore. Here in the Piazza the handling of water is matched to the allusions to the architectural orders - insane water-park scholarship.

He wrote "Tuscan was the simplest - a ring of water to make what was supposed to be an unfluted column, though the closely spaced jets begin to suggest fluting. The Doric got metopes of water jets and stainless steel columns split like an ancient helmet to reveal water running down inside and a stainless steel wall behind the columns with water running down the surface. In the corners above the central arch on the Doric wall I had thought to put huge windshield wipers to push away the falling water, but that suggestion was rejected as tasteless; only to be replaced furtively by my head spouting water. The Ionic order had water flying around in volutes, a liquid egg-and-dart molding. The Corinthian sported capitals of acanthus-shaped jets, and the Composite combined those with volutes of water and jets up between the fluting."

Moore's built work has not aged well.

He chose not to develop a consistent signature style. He was too attached to ongoing dialectic and cross-fertilization to settle for such a thing. Much of his important work, like the campus of Kresge College at UC Santa Cruz in the form of an irregular academic Italian-hill-village, seems as dated and faintly ridiculous as Moore's own bulbous eyeglasses and muttonchop sideburns. The Beverly Hills Civic Center seems to me Beaux-Art symmetry in a 70's suit. It is unkind to say so but Moore's work at the top of Lawrence Halprin's Lovejoy Fountain in Portland Oregon is an irregular wooden pavilion that reeks of the 1970s.

The Piazza d'Italia, I suggest, has not aged well.

But past all that Moore was a great teacher, they say, and a truly great writer. Check out his book about Los Angeles, "The City Observed," then check out "The Place of Houses."

And he was inspiring disorganized and guided by a sense of fun, adventure, risk. "Sorry for the delay in answering your urgent letter from a year ago." Moore was always better when you consider him against an authority figure. At Yale, where he was the Dean of Architecture, the authority figure was his predecessor, Paul Rudolph, that buzz-cut authoritarian. He had partners-as-straightmen in his architectural practice and co-authors-as-straightmen in his writing career.

When you know all that it's easier to look smilingly on this place. He was just trying to have some fun. This was his idea of fun. If the Piazza d'Italia stood across the street from some glass-curtain-walled uptight HOK monstrosity its sense of humor would shine. It needs a disapproving authoritarian straight man. In a dull town, this could be the joker in the deck.

Moore's quote from "Chambers for a Memory Palace." Some material copied from Wikipedia, but I put it there.

These pictures of the Piazza d'Italia were taken in August, 2005, two weeks before Katrina.