Paradoxes of Pienza

One morning I was awoken by church bells. With my eyes still closed I listened to them pealing....and pealing and pealing. I grew suspicious and opened my eyes, only to find that it was the wake-up call on my computer that was set for "carillon". It seems to me that machines can do things well and cheaply. We all saw the bell swinging in the tower, and it was really great; but electronic equipment would be one-hundredth the cost of that tower. We must not be utter snobs; let us try to bear in mind the affordable version of the things that we love in Pienza.

During this time in Italy I was able to observe a few waiters and chambermaids in their work and also two bus drivers. They looked spirited, in the manner of Italians at their best. I saw only two farmers, a man and a woman. They were no older than the others, but they were worn out. They seemed irrevocably marked by labor and worry. It seems to me that the tourism industry is a blessing for many working people, and that our group’s delight in farming is not necessarily shared by the farmers themselves.

The landscape viewed from my hotel window is similar to the one from the Pope's own loggia. It is the most perfectly beautiful that I have ever seen. And yet it is a landscape that is not natural--it is entirely manipulated. People have been working on it for about three thousand years. Nature, we know, can be sublime; but so can the work of the human mind, hand and eye. Yet this is not readily acknowledged by American environmentalists. They may not allow us to build a landscape like Tuscany. This is tragic for them, and also for the rest of us.

You probably saw the wonderful nighttime activity on the piazza: the older folk sitting on the benches, the young children and the somewhat older girls playing together most decorously. They were great at jump-the-rope and various other pretty games. But where were the boys and young men? Where were the scuttling little radio-controlled cars, and the brutal clacking of skateboards? Not at the piazza, apparently. Why not? It seems to me that the particular type of brick pavement is not friendly to small-diameter wheels. I later saw the boys and their girlfriends hanging out outside the city gates, leaning on their cars and motorcycles, on asphalt. We need both kinds of places, evidently.

Did anyone notice the walls of the Pienza buildings? They were beautiful; yet they were made out of any old thing that the masons found lying around. There is cut stone of all sizes, there is also rubble just hauled in from the field, and used brick, and pieces of marble, perhaps from Roman ruins. These grotty walls were obviously intended to be covered with stucco and painted. I bet that it was under the influence of Ruskin's 19th Century campaign for authentic construction that the stucco when it began to fall off, as it periodically does, was simply scraped off entirely. Ruskin fostered a taste for rustic handwork that we, from the industrialized countries, retain.

To me, one of the most heartening things about Pienza is that that quality of the construction is quite low…and that it doesn't seem to matter. Just about every bit of workmanship that I could see was substandard. Take the Council Chamber where we met: the lumpy stucco walls, the amateurish band of frescoes; the hack carpentry of the tables; the wall stains from roof leaks, the floors out of level, the steps all different sizes. As an architect, I would have to reject all of this work on behalf of our clients. It is all so rough, even by our low American construction standards…and yet the place is wonderful. Pienza is a lesson on the power of transcendental ideas. This kind of city and this kind of architecture transcends the technical limits of its time. Our problem today is that it is difficult to sustain great ideas when we are otherwise occupied in convincing the venal and the ignorant who are usually in charge of our cities.

I may be wrong, but I think that the beautiful pavement of the main Piazza was installed under Mussolini. The giveaway is that it is too well done, more perfect than anything else on the piazza, including the surrounding buildings. It should not surprise us that we like Italian architecture of the thirties. There is a distinct coincidence between great cities and centralized power. We heard how the Pope Piccolomini ordered everyone about, and thus Pienza became great. The other great places of Europe, were they not created by the will of Cardinals, Dukes and Kings in a manner that we would today consider exceedingly repressive? It is a charming provincialism of Americans to believe that democracy does all things best. Most things are indeed better under our individualistic American democracy, but urbanism is not among them. This sort of thing is difficult to acknowledge; but it is one of the lessons of Pienza that we should not avoid discussing. Everyone might as well know that one of the things that Seaside shares with Pienza is that an American developer today can be as prescriptive as a European overlord, and just as quality conscious.

We all heard from the historians that Pienza was willed into being by a Pope. If it was willed, then it was intentional, and if it was intentional, then it was designed. Pienza is a designed artifact. I think that this would surprise most Americans, who tend to think that the nicest cities "just happened." We Americans are connoisseurs of design so long as it is small scale: appliances, cars, computers. . . but when it comes to urbanism we are barbarians. Whether we like it or not, our cities are designed. We must become experts, and the first step is to acknowledge that cities are intentional: we decide what they will be like.

The plan of Pienza is a very simple one: There is the spine of a main street along the ridge, connecting gate to gate. Most shops are along it. The piazza with all the civic buildings is at its approximate center, which is also the high point of the ridge. Smaller streets, like ribs, emanate from the spine out to the edges; they are not more than one short block in length. On one side of the spine these ribs connect to the relatively ugly parking belt outside. They are all bent so that it is impossible to see the parking from the main street. On the other side the ribs do not deflect, so they let in to the spine the view of the landscape, and the breezes. This plan at this same scale can be used in the United States today for the design of an apartment complex, a shopping mall, an office building or a high school. Why are we looking at Pienza if not to emulate it?