Vance, to soften the monumental effect by filling the foreground and This is not just a story about Los Angeles and its environs,
middle ground with people in motion. Diniz’s ideal city becomes an however. For, ever since the first bungalow courts, motels and
enormous lobby or college campus, filled with movement, conversa- drive-in markets, a mix of climate, lack of inhibition, patterns of
tion, signage, lamps, clocks, clothing, color. settlement and explosive growth had made southern California
As they turned away from the monumental uniformity of the an incubator of new building types. So too in the transformative
first megaprojects toward this new “humanism,” in which huge schemes of the ‘60s and ‘70s envisioned by Diniz, myriad proto-
interventions were disguised by disparate scales and shapes, inti- types appear before their time: the reconception of the office park
mate covered walkways and active streetscapes, Diniz’s drawings as a fully-fledged edge city, the open suburban shopping center,
played a central role in suggesting how one city in particular might the suburb as recreation center and resort, the office as campus, the
see its future: his home town of Los Angeles. In his first drawings, downtown mall. In fleshing out their possibilities and suggesting
we can see Los Angeles steadily moving toward the unabashedly how they would be used, his drawings — with a little movement, the
vast panoramas, open plazas and soaring scales of the Space Age odd shadow, a touch of color and the peopling of space to animate
as it tried to become the metropolis it had never been. In line with a static design — began to establish the vital visual and social stan-
that first aspiration toward a new urban grandeur came a desire to dards against which these new environments would be expected to
rethink the Southern California suburb in more structured terms — perform. For as Diniz’s renderings move from showing how inter-
as new planned cities in a managed landscape — and a focus on ventions at a panoramic scale would enliven the urban landscape,
asserting a new sense of civic pride and worth through conspicu- to demonstrating how vitality could come only by making that pan-
ous cultural landmarks: highly visible pavilions and campuses of art orama intimate and its aesthetics sentimental, they start to make as
and music, creativity and design. As the new neighborhoods on the vehement, and seductive, a case against the idea of modernity as
widening perimeters of Los Angeles quickly overtook the traditional they had initially made on its behalf. n
commercial subcenters, those older downtowns began systemati-
cally to borrow the social aesthetics of the new suburb, bringing Nicholas Olsberg was chief curator and director of the Canadian Centre
back home, at a metropolitan scale and in more modern-looking for Architecture in Montréal. He has written about the architecture of
form, the same fundamental idea of streetscape, town center and Los Angeles, the cultural roles of architecture, design and urbanism
village green. As the renderings move from the splendors of sleek- in modern society and the work of Frank Lloyd Wright, John Lautner,
ness, panorama, vista and scale to this increasing sense of density, Carlo Scarpa, Arthur Erickson and others. His last article for Modernism
articulation and animation, we can start to wonder whether this was “John Lautner: Dissolving the Confines,” Vol. 11, No. 1.
shift in what we seemed to want of the urban landscape owes as
much to Diniz’s ubiquitous and persuasive illustrations as to the All illustrations © Carlos Diniz; courtesy of Edward Cella
architects and developers who conceived them. Art+Architecture.
42 www.modernismmagazine.com
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