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Piazza d'Italia as an Example of Postmodern Architecture Essay

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Piazza d'Italia as an Example of Postmodern Architecture

A public place incorporated into a larger commercial complex, the fountain of the Piazza d'Italia occupies a circular area off center of the development, which consists of buildings and open-air corridors planted with trees. The fountain is set on a ground of concentric circles in brick and masonry, and is composed of a raised contour relief of the boot of Italy and a construction of several staggered, interconnected facades following the lines of the circles. Each facade incorporates one of the five Classical Orders in various materials, including marble, stainless steel, artificial lighting and water. The facades are one side of the space and the whole is surrounded by a ring of
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The Tuscan columns, for example, are fully covered in polished stainless steel and their moldings and curves have been abstracted to a minimum of flat, conic and cylindrical shapes, striping away the entasis (5). The Tuscan architrave carries square panels of water jets which Moore's memoirs refer to as "wetopes" (6). The horizontal molding bounding the echinus of several stainless steel capitals were made of rings of neon lights. The Doric colonnade has no physical shafts, only cylindrical streams of pellucid water. Whilte it has the rounded echinus and and abacus, the shaft is only suggested by the water. Some of the composite columns have angular, stylized stainless steel capitals. These had no echinus moldings, simple scrolls for volutes ancanthus leaves merely suggested by triangles and were sprayed by more small jets of water. In their flutes, florid carved fillets were replaced with geysers. These composite columns had the appropriate half-circle flutes on the shaft, and fairly complete moldings at that top and bottom of the shaft. The Ionic columns possessed the simpler and more fluid Greek volutes and had the base and echinus convex molding. The alternately concave and convex moldings at the foot of the Ionic columns were in style of Roman examples. In fact, streams of water were placed everywhere: on the Doric architrave, the Ionic entablature, almost every pedestal, and the ridges of the Italian peninsula. Even two roundels
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