For and Against the Modern
Los Angeles in the Illustrations of Carlos Diniz
By Nicholas Olsberg
Until the late 1950s, for cities across America, modernism was some- perhaps some of the Modern’s rawness and spice had, in this long
thing of a chimera: the occasional isolated cube of glass gleaming simmering, been overcooked into conformity and standardization.
amid a towering historicist skyline of brick and masonry; the odd In any event, it took less than 20 years for the great construction
curve of a concrete ramp or tunnel converging with the steel trestles boom that began with the Seagram Building (1958) in New York
of a raised roadway; a tiny cluster of Eichler homes within a vast and ended with the Sears Tower (1976) in Chicago to satisfy our
new suburb of Cape Cods and Colonials. By the time it did come desire to be thrilled by the scale and sheen of the new. Well before
into sight — exploding across the country in suburban shopping the results of that boom were fully on the ground, as the optimistic
centers and office parks, in downtown corporate headquarters, con- high tide of Cold War prosperity gave way first to the social upheav-
vention centers, hotels and cultural complexes — its engines were als of the inner city and then to the energy crisis of 1973, we had
economic rather than aesthetic. Its fundamental characteristics already turned against the impersonal scale, the repetitiveness and
were governed by depreciation tables and occupancy statistics, its the mechanistic systems that it had apparently produced.
material and visual language determined by the cost-accountancy
So it is easy to forget how captivating these transformations
of construction and real estate. It had been fully 30 years since our
seemed as they first appeared, how well they spoke to a Space Age
cities started re-imagining themselves in shining glass towers, our
sensibility and how inventive were the first efforts to correct their
suburbs in green and white precincts of concrete and parkland, and
unwanted impact. Such vast swaths of the world we now live in
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