New Orleans, 1978. In the heart of the city's Italian-American quarter, among the downtown warehouses, a small circular piazza opens, paved in concentric rings of coloured marble. At its centre, a fountain reproduces in miniature the shape of the Italian boot, with water tracing the course of the real rivers. Around it, a ring of classical columns — Doric, Ionic, Corinthian — clad in polished stainless steel and lit by pink and green neon. It is not a ruin: it is brand new, built on purpose to look ancient and on purpose to get the proportions wrong. Its designer is Charles Moore, and he calls it Piazza d'Italia.
An architect who loves quotation
Moore is born in 1925 in Battle Creek, Michigan, and trains at Princeton, where in 1957 he earns a doctorate with a thesis on water in architecture. He teaches at Berkeley, then Yale, then UCLA, then elsewhere again: he changes school several times over his career, and everywhere leaves students who remember him as a generous teacher rather than a systematic theorist. In 1962 he builds his own house in Orinda, California: a single large room under a pavilion roof, with two small wooden aedicules, inspired by Renaissance canopies, enclosing the bathtub and the fireplace. It is the first sign of an idea that will stay with him for life: architecture can quote history without copying it, with irony.
In 1966 Robert Venturi publishes Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, the book that opens the way to postmodernism: against the minimalism of the Modern Movement, it proposes an architecture that accepts ambiguity, historical quotation, even bad taste as expressive material. Moore, a contemporary and friend within that cultural climate, does not write an equally influential manifesto, but builds what Venturi theorises: middle-class houses with arches, pediments and bright colours, residential complexes like Sea Ranch (1965, with Lyndon, Turnbull and Whitaker), on the California coast, where volumes of raw wood cluster around shared courtyards, in direct dialogue with the landscape.
A piazza for a community that has scattered
Piazza d'Italia is born from an initiative of New Orleans' Italian-American community, who wanted a symbolic place downtown, and Moore designs it with August Perez Associates. The form is that of a small miniature Roman forum, with the five classical orders — Tuscan, Doric, Ionic, Corinthian, Composite — built in modern and deliberately excessive materials: mirrored steel columns, neon-lit capitals, cornices that seem to melt like waterfalls. The boot-shaped fountain traces, with running water, the course of the Po, the Tiber and the Arno, and is meant to be a place of celebration too, not only contemplation: residents used it for carnival and for neighbourhood festivals.
The piazza is also a game: the columns support nothing real, some are cut in half to show their own section, like a technical drawing made three-dimensional. Moore calls it «a supergraphic in three dimensions». But the project has a short life: in the 1980s the surrounding district falls into decline, the ground-floor shops planned for it never really open, the neon breaks down and is not repaired, the fountain's water is switched off for years. The piazza becomes the opposite symbol of what it was born for: the textbook example of how a good design can fail without maintenance and without an urban fabric around it to sustain it.
A restoration and a lesson
In the 2000s the piazza is restored, the water flows again, and today it is once more a place the city cares for, even though the district around it is no longer the one imagined in the 1970s. Charles Moore dies in 1993, without seeing either the decline or the recovery. The piazza remains one of the built manifestos of American postmodernism, together with Michael Graves' Portland Building (1982): an architecture that had brought history, colour and irony back into a discipline that the Modern Movement had wanted to strip of all that. Not everyone loved the result — many critics judged it kitsch — but no one can deny that it reopened a conversation that had seemed closed.
An Italian village on a Californian hillside
Before New Orleans, Moore had already tested the same idea of architecture as a collective stage in a very different setting: a university campus among the redwoods of California. Kresge College, one of the residential colleges of the University of California, Santa Cruz, is built between 1966 and 1974, designed by Moore with William Turnbull, his partner at the firm MLTW. Instead of isolated buildings linked by paths, Moore and Turnbull design a single pedestrian «street» about three hundred metres long, bending at a right angle and climbing to an octagonal communal dining hall: an Italian hillside village, built in timber and white stucco, with the façades facing the street painted in bright colours and the outer one, toward the woods, left in natural terracotta.
The college is born from a precise pedagogical idea, developed together with its founding provost, the psychologist Robert Edgar: students were meant to live a community life comparable to that of a real village, with the «street» as an informal meeting space in place of the anonymous corridors of traditional dormitories. It is the same principle that, ten years later, will guide Piazza d'Italia: architecture as a structure inviting spontaneous use, not an object to be admired from a distance. The college is still active and inhabited by students today, and an extension designed by the firm Studio Gang was completed in the 2010s to add new housing while keeping Moore and Turnbull's historic core intact.