Charles Moore, Piazza d’Italia

One of the most significant developments in later-20th-century architecture (as well as in contemporaneous painting and sculpture) was postmodernism. Postmodernist architects rejected the severity and simplicity of the modernist idiom pioneered by Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, and their postwar successors. Instead, they celebrated complexity and incorporated historical references in their designs, often rendered in high-tech materials unavailable to earlier architects.

An outstanding example of a postmodernist design that creates a dialogue between the past and the present is Piazza d’Italia (Plaza of Italy) in New Orleans by American architect Charles Moore (1925–1993), dean of the Yale School of Architecture from 1965 to 1970. Designed in the late 1970s and restored after sustaining serious damage in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Piazza d’Italia is dedicated to the city’s Italian American community. Appropriately, Moore selected elements relating specifically to Italian history, all the way back to ancient Roman culture.

Piazza d’Italia is an open circular area partially formed by short segments of colonnades arranged in staggered concentric arcs, which direct the eye to the focal point of the composition—an exedra. This recessed area on a raised platform serves as a rostrum (speaker’s platform) during the annual festivities of Saint Joseph’s Day. Moore inlaid the piazza’s pavement with a map of Italy centered on Sicily, from which the majority of the city’s Italian families originated. From there, the map’s Italian “boot” stretches to the steps, which correspond to the Alps, and ascends the rostrum.

The piazza’s most immediate historical references are to the porticos of an ancient Roman forum and to triumphal arches, but the irregular placement of the concentrically arranged colonnade fragments inserts a note of instability into the design reminiscent of Mannerism. Illusionistic devices, such as the continuation of the piazza’s pavement design (apparently through a building and out into the street), are Baroque in character. Moore incorporated all the classical orders—most with whimsical modifications, such as the stainless-steel columns and capitals, neon collars around the column necks, and neon lights framing various parts of the exedra and porticos for dramatic multicolored nighttime illumination. He even made references to medieval architecture by including modern versions of flying buttresses, and alternating white and gray-green stones in emulation of medieval buildings in Florence, Siena, and Orvieto. This kind of architectural eclecticism, especially rich in Piazza d’Italia, epitomizes postmodernism.^[1]