The Watts Towers were built single-handedly by Sabato “Simon” Rodia, an Italian immigrant tile-setter, in his back yard in the Watts neighbourhood of south Los Angeles. He worked for thirty-three years, from 1921 to 1954, without any architectural training, formal plans, or scaffolding. When he had finished he gave the property away to a neighbour and left Los Angeles, never to return.
The complex consists of seventeen interconnected sculptures rising from a triangular lot. The two tallest reach approximately thirty metres, which made them the tallest unreinforced slender structures of their kind in the world at the time of their completion. The structural armature is steel reinforcement bar and salvaged steel pipe, bent by hand and tied together with wire. Rodia then coated the armature in cement mortar and pressed in tens of thousands of fragments of broken pottery, tile, glass bottles, seashells, and ceramic dishware while the mortar was still wet. He worked from the ground upward, climbing his own structures as they grew, without a single piece of scaffolding. The geometry of each tower is loosely conical or spiral, with branching members that suggest inverted trees or marine corals. The composition is held together at the base by an enclosing perimeter wall and a smaller series of garden pavilions. After Rodia’s departure the city declared the towers unsafe and proposed demolition. In 1959 the towers were subjected to a stress test in which a winch and truck attempted to pull the tallest tower down with a force of 10,000 pounds. The towers did not move; the truck’s testing equipment did. They were saved.
The Watts Towers are a National Historic Landmark and a reminder that the most architecturally significant works in a city are not always the product of an architect. They demonstrate that an autodidact tile-setter, working in his free time with salvaged steel and broken crockery, can produce a structurally rigorous and culturally indispensable monument.