Standing Apart
Early in the ’60s, with the Hollywood studio system in free-fall and the
city’s major industries beginning to drift away, new development projects
offered a denser, service-oriented city at an enormous scale, with new aspi-
rations toward metropolitan style and grandeur. Los Angeles was never
a sidewalk city. Scattered, sprawling and mostly indifferent to the street
front, the studios and their patterns of development had left it with vast
were made in that era that it is surely worth looking acreages of barely built land. That new density could therefore be built on
back at how they were first sold to us and how that the lines of the modernist dreamscape: huge self-contained complexes that
desire for the new was then revised. Since no major could stand up or be set back to gain light, commercial visibility and air,
project reached the ground without the approval cities within the city that could turn their backs on the street or drop below
of a community of willing investors, planners and the roadway to separate public space into sweeping enclosures and broad
the public, the sensibility of the person illustrating pedestrian precincts.
the scheme for presentation was critical. One archi- The curved wall and descending terraces of Minoru Yamasaki’s enor-
tectural illustrator above all was engaged to carry mous Century Plaza hotel (1961–66) were conceived at an entirely new
out that job of anticipation and to communicate its scale, anchoring the western edge of Century City, the vast new urban
promise, and that was Carlos Diniz. center then emerging from scratch on the empty backlots of a major studio.
Born of Brazilian parents, Diniz grew up in Los Diniz’s screenprinted illustrations set this huge building — it was the largest
Angeles, studied industrial design at Art Center hotel in the West — dramatically apart from its environment, a presence
College in the early 1950s and then joined the archi- against the sky from afar and a sunken world of its own at close quarters.
tectural and planning firm of Victor Gruen, where he
developed promotional materials for the large scale
Opposite Carlos Diniz, Century Plaza Hotel, Lower Level View, 1964.
Minoru Yamasaki, architect. Screenprint on paper.
Above Carlos Diniz, Century Plaza Hotel, Tower View, 1964. Minoru
Yamasaki, architect. Sceenprint on paper.
www.modernismmagazine.com 35
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