This tray is to Michelangelo, whose "awesomeness" Robert Venturi hes admired ever since he was a student at Princeton School of Architecture. But it is chiefly a homage to Rome, a city which he has deply loved and explored of the historical continuity of architecture. Taken from piazza del Campidoglio, one of the urban spaces that have fascinated him most, is his "applied ornament", the design on the pavement: twelve points of star radiate and intersect in a not too stricly geometric arrangement, which contrasts whith a movement centripetal to the open trapezioidal shape of the square.

Urban reality os constantly referred to in Venturi's projects. And is what it is what led him to rediscover the authentic parameters of the American city's social and urban structure, the American vernacular. Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi, who have frequently visited Italy, "bad a particular sympathy for the spatial relationships, pedestrian scale, and urban quality of Italian towns exemplified in the piazza....This is because as architects of the '50s we saw the piazza.... as gry configurations of compositional elements..... Architecture as shelter with symbols on it".

Oval tray in 18/10 stainless steel mirror polished.