Follow the Sun: The Estate Romana of Los Angeles ’84

On a Sunday in August of 1948, the sun bathed the architecture of Rome with what Robert Venturi referred to as a ‘golden air’. Years later, in July 1984, that sun moved from Rome to Los Angeles for the XXIII Olympiad, giving life, for a summer, to a palimpsest of figurative operations, actions, elements, and objects, projects extracted from the treatises on and dreams of classicism, to reconfigure the ‘ecologies’ of the city by means of celebratory themes. Retracing the theory of the ephemeral behind the Estate Romana (‘Roman summer’), the Californian metropolis was transformed by architectural installations that saw Rome and its monuments as a possible source for building an ‘ancient’ city in colours like hot magenta, even if just for one summer.