Confetti over the city : Los Angeles '84: narrazione e contenuto di una "festa di strada"

On July 28, 1984 Ronald Reagan officially opened the XXIII Olympic Games in Los Angeles in an energetic ceremony at the Memorial Coliseum Stadium. In this occasion the city of the sun rediscovered in its streets the possibility of building a new world and re-reading urban geography through a map of ephemeral architectures composed of columns and triumphal arches, towers and obelisks in which the functional colors to the ornamentation and to its necessary opulence have reinvented Palladian education. «The most ceremonial juxtaposition consisted of magenta, vermilion, chrome yellow, and aqua stars on a white field within bands of aqua, light blue and magenta. The layering of stripes, lighter color next to darker, thick next to thin is an abstraction of the logo of the Los Angeles Games». America of the 80s celebrates bigness, reinvents the column, the arches and transforms the wall building art of ancient Rome into plastic and aluminum monuments, paper and nylon in the name of sport and the Olympics, able to defeat the demon of irrelevance and to define a reactionary mechanism of machines à rêver. Los Angeles thus becomes the scene of a new possible essay on architecture, called "festive federalism", proposing the time of the celebration and its television reproducibility by means of the ephemeral. The essay examines, 35 years after the first article appeared in Italy, the times, myths and spaces of the architecture of the celebration as elements to be mapped of a deforming idea of city and linguistic and narrative coding to define a document on the theory of monumental scale project.