“De Amicis 154” Residential Building

Looking through photographs of Los Angeles taken a century ago is quite a shock. The place is a semi-desert, dotted with sparse vegetation and buildings – almost all of them pueblos, Spanish-style adobe brick houses – aligned as if part of a military camp in the process of being set up. Today, any photo of the city shows a completely different picture. After only a century, it is saturated. The four founding systems posited by Reyner Banham in his extraordinary Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (1971) – the beach, freeways, flatlands, and foothills – now seem merged together, one an off-shoot of the other, each reliant on the other. And yet, you get the feeling that the city is still in the making: a city with a decidedly strong vibe, even beautiful in its way, but one that exudes what we could call a fundamental instability; a city that still has a temporary look about it. Guido Piovene and his wife traveled the length and breadth of the United States by car. The outcome was De America (1953), one of the very first on-the-road books. 

On the West Coast, Piovene was fascinated by Los Angeles. In fact, he would later refer to it in his subsequent Viaggio in Italia (Journey through Italy, 1957). Pescara is a new city, a former fishing village transformed as late as the 1920s with extensions going in two directions at right angles to each other: one perpendicular to the coast following the course of the river, the other, hugging the coast. As is often the case on Italy’s Adriatic coastline, urban development parallel to the sea is a long series of zoned areas approved for palazzine, small apartment blocks built to house members of the former fishing community who wanted to remain close to the sea, and the first holiday homes. The palazzina is a wholly Italian invention, the product of urban development in Rome. These small apartment blocks were the result...

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