#designandenvironment

In one of their recent projects, however, the Venturis found the perfect vehicle for Pop architecture. California City, in the middle of the Mojave Desert, is a new town of 100,000 subdivided acres and 2,000 inhabitants. Venturi and Rauch were hired to plan some of the extensive public facilities that are necessary to attract and convince potential buyers of lots. First, they planned a series of stops along the approach highway, where the salesman could pause with his clients to recite another chapter in his sales pitch. (The salesmen probably do not realize that the architects consider the highway, with its iconography, a modern counterpart of the Via Appia.) They also designed a small commercial strip, planned a subdivision encircling a golf course, and designed a funeral parlor and a cemetery that looks like an English Romantic landscape. (Cemeteries are profitable ventures). Finally, they designed a Civic Center - a legitimate opportunity, they felt, to design a duck. Their first thought, they say, without a glimmer of a smile, was to reproduce the Eiffel Tower at 7/8th scale: “this would bring world renown to our city.” Instead, they settled on a cube 90 feet square and high. To deal with the desert heat they devised a Pop brise-soleil: the use of mirrored glass, tinted gold like the windows, so that from a distance the image is a golden mirrored cube sitting on a bed of flowers - certainly a striking object to find in the middle of the desert... There are few California Cities around for architects to play with...