This 28-by-69-inch horizontal panorama documents the Watts Towers in Los Angeles—Simon Rodia’s monumental folk art construction that rises from a residential lot in South Los Angeles. The nearly six-foot width captures the towers’ aspiring verticality and the intricate surfaces created from broken pottery, tiles, and found objects.

Created in 1987, the work documents the most significant example of American outsider architecture: seventeen interconnected structures that Italian immigrant Rodia built single-handedly over thirty-three years (1921-1954). The towers rise to nearly one hundred feet, their steel-reinforced concrete armatures covered with mosaic surfaces incorporating over 70,000 pieces of pottery, tile, glass, and seashells.

The horizontal format captures the towers’ spread across their lot while emphasizing their relationship to the surrounding neighborhood. Rodia built in Watts, a working-class community whose 1965 uprising brought national attention to urban inequality. The towers preceded that uprising by decades, their presence in the neighborhood creating accidental juxtaposition with its troubled history.

The photo collage technique proves particularly suited to documenting Rodia’s mosaic surfaces: the assembled fragments of pottery and tile that cover every surface find visual echo in Hayashi’s own assembled fragments of photographic prints. The towers’ handmade accretion parallels the collage technique’s accumulative process.

The Watts Towers achieved National Historic Landmark status in 1990, formal recognition of Rodia’s obsessive achievement as cultural heritage. This panorama documents the site as architectural marvel and neighborhood presence, the towers’ aspiration rising from ordinary residential context.