Light and the abundance of space were central to the form and content of Simon Rodia’s Watts Towers. In 1921 he purchased a house on a wedge-shaped lot with a spacious side yard, like most Southern California residential homes. Light would be an important aspect of the materials he selected to festoon his seventeen different sculptures, including three towers standing between fifty-five and nearly one-hundred-feet tall. He collected fragments of glass, pop bottles, pottery, cups, plates, automobile glass, window glass, mirrors, bottoms of bottles, teapots and tiles, as well as seashells he gathered during his walks on Southern California beaches. The tiles, whole and fragments, came from a variety of manufacturers in Southern California. He placed these in bins on the site and carefully selected the fragments for their placement. He kept a fire burning on the back of his property where he melted glass into free forms before he embedded them into the walls of his sculptures. He used household and industrial objects to press designs into his drying mortar, from the backs of ice cream parlor chairs, wire rug beaters, and faucet handles, to gears, iron gates, grills, baskets, and cooking utensils. He poured mortar into cast-iron corn bread bakers, removed the dried mortar, and inserted the panels into his sculptures. On other surfaces he inscribed freehand designs into his wet mortar. Into sections of his exterior wall, he pressed images of his tools—hammers, pliers, and files—signs of his immigrant working class values.

But Rodia’s site is not just a random collection of junk. It is a controlled work created from the many carefully selected materials collected from his surroundings. As the Southern California light passes over the multicolored surfaces of his sculptures during the day, it creates a polyphonic luminosity. The combination of free-form glass and tile fragments reflect the Southern California light in inharmonic tones and shades. The elongated, arched buttresses that crisscross the site and that also form the round circles on the towers cast a network of changing shadows across the site. Like Southern California around it and like Rodia’s own life, the sculptures are not static. They change with the movement and intensity of the sun. Though made of reinforced concrete, the giant towers appear light and airy, more celestial than earth bound.

Excerpt from: Kenneth Scambray, “Creative Responses to the Italian Immigrant Experience in California: Baldassare Forestiere’s “Underground Gardens” and Simon Rodia’s “Watts Towers,” in The Italian American Review, Volume 8, Number 2, Autumn/Winter 2001. 131-32. All rights reserved.