“When asked to identify “monumental architecture” within the urban centers of California, Charles Moore nearly came up empty-handed. “This is, after all, a floating world,” Moore wrote in his landmark essay “You Have to Pay for the Public Life” (1965), “in which a floating population can island-hop with impunity” in cars functionally inseparable from human bodies. In Southern California, Moore argued, monumental architecture and “the public life” were relegated to theme parks, where an admission fee granted entrance to more pedestrian-scaled environments inspired by urban developments predating the automobile.
This is still true in the Coachella Valley, to a significant degree. Few public parks and libraries are available to the approximately 400,000 residents spread out across the desert region covering more than 600 square miles of Southern California—a population density of less than one person per acre—and even fewer are grounded by the elements of monumentality Moore considered essential to a dignified public realm…”
