(b Avellino, nr Naples, c. 1879; d Martinez, CA, 19 July 1965). American labourer and amateur artist of Italian birth. He went to the USA c. 1893. Uneducated, he worked at a variety of construction jobs as a labourer, making his way across the country. He settled in California, living in Long Beach and finally Watts, a depressed area in central Los Angeles. While working at various construction sites, he built a fireplace in the Las Feliz section of Los Angeles, a garden tower in Malibu and two concrete carousels in Long Beach. In these he developed a technique of encrusting concrete work with a mosaic of salvaged materials. In 1921, in the garden of his frame house in Watts, he began construction of a series of towers and garden ornaments, formed of steel bars covered in layers of concrete reinforced with wire, encrusted with pieces of broken pottery, glass, broken bottles and sea shells. They became known as the Watts Towers. They were an open web of bars, self-supporting and built without aid of scaffolding, the tallest of them eventually rising to c. 30 m. In 1954 Rodia abruptly stopped work on his garden sculpture and towers, and deeded them to a neighbour; he left Watts and moved to Martinez, near San Francisco. In 1957 the city of Los Angeles began proceedings to demolish the towers but a number of artists and others interested in the huge sculptures brought suit, subjected the towers to a stress test and convinced the city to leave the towers as a public cultural monument. Their preservation was paid for by Edward James.
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