Piazza D'Italia

 

Piazza D'Italia May 2011, lost in the bleakness of the sixties

When I stepped outside my hotel on Poydras Street in New Orleans, I stared right at the entry to the Piazza D'Italia, a little shrine to urbanism, post modern and classic form vocabulary that was quite the rage when it was first built in 1978, designed by Charles Moore, one of the inventors of post modern architecture. 

My then design mentor and boss, Heinz Egenhofer, a progeny of the Behnisch office in Stuttgart, was very taken by Moore's ironic play with architecture and my very first project, a high-school in Reutlingen, Germany, was designed with a modernist and a post modernist side including what we called "Moore's wall": A traditional brick wall with punched out openings placed 5 feet in front of a standard curtain wall. This wall provided shade and was in a way a "rain screen", but foremost it was an architectural gesture. (The 1976 building also had a landscaped green roof).

When I traveled to the US in 1980 for the first time in my life, it was clear that New Orleans and the brand new Piazza D'Italia had to be part of the itinerary. I recall that I found the real thing much less interesting than the many publications about it. I was not convinced that this type of kitsch was really the answer to modernism's overbearing austerity. But most I was stunned how this little piece of European place making was lost in a part of the city that had little spatial quality and was the typical US downtown hodgepodge of high-rises and parking lots. This was, of course, in stark contrast to the historic parts of New Orleans. Back in 1980, I was only getting my first exposure to the American pattern of cities where density and abandonment can co-exist cheek to jowl. 

As the ARCHITECT Magazine correctly notes in its current issue "post-mortem article about the Piazza d'Italia,  New Orleans has made little progress in making this part of downtown any more urban than it was in 1980. Unexpectedly standing there and revisiting Charles Moore's experimental space and game changer  gave me a jolt: It brought me full circle from being a young visiting German tourist to being an old US citizen, from being an architectural greenhorn to being a Fellow and from being a casual observer of the American City to being an active participant in at least one US City. 

Pizza D'Italia looked aged, not only because of the faded colors but also because post modernism has proven to have been a fad that went nowhere in particular. Yet, the desire to make a compact urban place in the misery of hotel walls and surface parking lots has not lost any of its importance and relevance, not in New Orleans, and not in Baltimore.

The "screen wall" of the 1976 designed High School, my first project after architecture school