Architecture, Art, Hidden LA

Visualizing A New Los Angeles, 1962-81: The Architectural Renderings of Carlos Diniz

This portfolio is drawn from an exhibition at the Edward Cella Gallery in Santa Barbara that explores – through the drawings of one of the most important architectural illustrators of his time – the transformation of Los Angeles as it matured from a loose conurbation into the more self-conscious, consolidated, and monumental metropolis we know today.

CARLOS DINIZ

Carlos Diniz grew up in Los Angeles, studied Industrial Design at Art Center College and then joined Victor Gruen as part of a team developing promotional materials for the large-scale planning and shopping center schemes that Gruen pioneered in the Fifties. He left the firm six years later to found his own studio, collaborating with Art Krebs and other printmakers to produce the often elaborate visual documents employed to propose and promote new projects. With his work for the giant firms of SOM San Francisco, HOK St Louis and Minoru Yamasaki (whose World Trade Center Diniz portrayed in 1961), his practice rapidly expanded to a national level. He was soon providing promotional renderings for mega-projects throughout the world. By the 1980s, his picturesque approach to the downtown ‘festival place’ projects of the Rouse Company and to historicizing and humanizing massive schemes for London, Chicago and Boston made an enormous contribution to defining the urban aesthetic and sensibility that has marked the booming development of the last thirty years.

DRAWING THE FUTURE

Commissioned to portray sometimes quite rudimentary planning schemes as they might appear in final form Diniz proposed how their densities, siting and choreography would be perceived; and how their social patterns of occupancy and interaction might work. Precisely fleshing out a more or less exact architectural framework, his pen and ink drawings-made in preparation for the final prints or painted panels that would seduce investors, planning agencies, and public into backing the schemes – are magnificently fluid, using movement, shadow, a touch of color, and the peopling of space to animate a static design. From the vast archive of Diniz’s practice, the exhibition selects examples of these perspective drawings, showing how they worked with architects and planners to establish the great-city aspirations of Los Angeles from the final plan of Century City in 1962 – when the downtown core moved out – to the Grand Avenue schemes of 1980 – when after many false starts it began to move back in. Los Angeles in these years sputtered through successive phases of growth and decay, expansion and constraint, but we can see the city steadily moving away from the unabashedly vast panoramas, open plazas, and soaring scales of the Space Age toward the busy arcades, articulated layers, and street-like settings of the end of century.

STANDING APART

Screen prints from the Krebs studio shows Diniz’s work early in the Sixties when, with the Hollywood studio system in free-fall and the city’s major industries beginning to drift away, new projects began looking toward a denser city at a different level and with further aspirations toward metropolitan style and grandeur. Minoru Yamasaki’s enormous Century Plaza hotel (1961-66) was conceived at an entirely modern scale, anchoring the western edge of Century City, a vast new office park on the back-lots of a major studio. There, in Welton Becket’s master plan, clustered high-rises, set above a huge mound of garage space, sat within a rectangular platform of their own, defying the 50-foot street front of the main arterial boulevards that had prevailed for over 40 years.

The Hollywood (c.1960) was an un-built housing and office complex designed primarily by Paul R. Williams. Oriented away from the street into an interior courtyard, the three 31 storey towers created a controlled envelope within a dense commercial grid. Marked by outdoor mezzanines and sunken plazas, a heliport, 5000 car garage, air terminal, hotel, theaters, restaurants and shopping center, it was to have been the largest single complex on the West Coast. In setting up a balanced fusion of metropolitan living with entertainment, meeting, tourist, business and retail spaces – a city center within a city – the project also anticipates, though in a much more persuasive language, the new live-in malls of the present day.

LANDMARKS

Strategies for development in the years from 1962 looked toward concentrating its energies in more intense spaces, and to making their presence bolder and more conspicuous, scattering on the loose framework of Los Angeles the elements of a monumental city. Since the mid-fifties, the city’s once-absent cultural buildings had been promoted as a means not only to service art, music, theater and design but to punctuate the city’s wide horizon with symbols of a new sophistication. Such are Welton Becket’s un-built Theme Building for Century City (1962), which its developers actually described as ‘both cultural center and landmark’ and which Diniz therefore depicts as a shining beacon of light.

The boldest of these projects unites the central features of the ‘redevelopment’ era, Cesar Pelli and Tony Lumsden’s 1968 project, with DMJM, for Santa Monica Bay. Here a string of enclosed structures with different functions and expressions – from dwelling to work to culture – would actually stretch under the ocean to rise again in a transparent cylindrical tower. It is a set of discrete dense units organized into a campus, climaxing in a monumental landmark that celebrates the bay, which Diniz emphasizes through the Giacometti-like figures that give it scale.

Santa Monica Bay Village — Water Level View, 1968. Cesar Pelli and Tony Lumsden for Daniel, Mann, Johnson & Mendenhall, Architects

Art Center Campus — Perspective View, 1968. Craig Ellwood, Architect

Art Center Campus — Perspective View, 1968. Craig Ellwood & Associates with James Tyler and Stephen Woolley, Architects

Diniz shows Pelli’s huge ‘blue whale’ – the first phase of his Pacific Design Center (designed 1972-1974) – with heightened perspective, capturing the impression of a skyscraper on its side, its horizontal lines anchoring a great plaza that sets it off from the street; while Craig Elwood’s Art Center College – an entire campus folded into a single covered bridge – is drawn like as a great line across the hills, at once a testament to the persistent horizontality of Los Angeles and a landmark, like the blue whale, to the city’s new sense of its self as a generator of innovative arts rather than a repository of the old ones.

PROMENADES

In the face of the energy crisis and the urban panic that marked the late sixties and early 70s, the strategy for center city revitalization dwelt on dense, massy, secure-able envelopes organized as walled super-blocks, largely blind to the street. As at the Bonaventure, space, energy and freedom were enclosed within, and the city presented only high above street level as a distant panorama. Charles Luckman’s Broadway Plaza (now Macy’s Plaza) of 1973 is compressed into a tight stack of barely differentiated brick clad forms. The city appears only in the revolving restaurant on top; yet the wide descending interior streetscape is a powerful one – a sort of Piranesian crystal palace whose glass falls only at street-side, Diniz’s vignette of the interior showing how its constructive geometries animated the space below them.

Grand Avenue Competition — Overall View, 1980. Maguire Partners with Harry Perloff, Barton Myers, Edgardo Contini, Charles Moore, Lawrence Halprin, Cesar Pelli, Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer, Ricardo Legoretta, Frank Gehry, Sussman Prejza, and Robert Kennard

Santa Monica Place — Interior Atrium View Final, 1972. Frank O. Gehry, Architect

Santa Monica Place - Preliminary Sketch 3rd Street Entrance, 1972. Frank O. Gehry, Architect

Gehry and Gruen’s Santa Monica Place, designed with the Rouse Company from 1973-80, reached across a number of busy city blocks in an effort to give density to a depressed zone near the pier. Setting up a mix of buildings and uses, streets and pedestrian plazas, it conveyed that sense of intensely animated outdoor space that marked James Rouse’s urban thinking. Only the enclosed shopping center – a set of high, arcaded promenades that spoke to a more traditional, almost Milanese sense of the streetscape – was built. But the idea that a highly articulated, colorful and varied parade of street-fronts might bring the city back to life persisted in the rejected proposition of the ‘All-Star’ team for Bunker Hill’s Grand Avenue (1980). This visionary promenade, its streetscape designed by Charles Moore and Lawrence Halprin, failed; but it fit Los Angeles perfectly – a festival place in the Rouse tradition, but devoid of historical reference, sentiment and reassurance, stretched out in a horizontal line and fusing as if by chance a confrontational mélange of buildings and materials at different scale. It is perhaps the last great imaginative flourish in a generation’s symphony of dreams for a city with a sense of grandeur.

Broadway Plaza — Overall View of Hotel, 1973. Charles Luckman + Associates, Architects

Broadway Plaza — Hotel Lobby, 1973. Charles Luckman + Associates, Architects