“A City within the Country, Country within the City”
From 1942 to 1962, the population of Los Angeles
urban renewal and shopping center schemes that Gruen pioneered.
County more than doubled. For the next 20 years it
He left the firm in 1958, just as the great city building boom began, to
remained almost static, while the four surrounding
found his own architectural illustration studio. Clients came first from
counties, built on the skeleton of the freeway system,
Gruen and his fertile stable, notably Cesar Pelli and Frank O. Gehry;
grew as much as 25 percent per year. As the city
but his practice rapidly expanded to a national level with work for the
stretched out to ranchland, developers discovered that
giant firms of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, San Francisco; Hellmuth,
planned suburbs with a consistent aesthetic program
Obata, Kassabaum, St Louis; and Minoru Yamasaki, for whom Diniz
of spaciousness, rusticity and only a gentle hint of the
developed an elaborate series of presentation panels for New York’s
traditional city achieved profits far in excess of the tra-
World Trade Center. By the mid ‘70s, Diniz was providing promo-
ditional market in lots and parcels.
tional renderings for megaprojects throughout the world.
Westlake Village, built from 1964 to the mid ‘70s
Diniz’s illustrations represent a late flowering — well into the age of
on a movie ranch that straddled two counties, flooded
abstraction, photographs, primary colors and multiples, and long past
an entire valley to establish the lake that would give
it open vistas and a focal point. Diniz’s bird’s-eye
view of the vast scheme was drawn for a huge mural
that sat in the sales office. It depicts Westlake as self-
sufficient with a network of office parks and light
industry. Though the village is nestled high in spa-
cious canyon country, the boundaries of the lake,
which is central in Diniz’s distant view and in a closer
“lifestyle” view, nudged habitations and services into
denser social patterns than the traditional suburb:
townhouse clusters, communal parking, harbor-
front single lots, waterfront shopping and services.
Diniz’s overview shows how the generous distri-
bution, pedestrian piers and walkways, recreation
centers, open land and limited roadways (a model
approach to limiting infrastructure in the landscape)
could be used to give the suburb the character
of a pleasure resort. The close-up vignette strengthens
that feeling by its brilliant evocation of quaint, exotic
and modern artifice that mixes Maine, Provence and
Polynesia into a single maritime aesthetic vocabulary.
Right Carlos Diniz, Westlake Village, Boat Club, 1966.
McIntire and Quiros, engineers. Pen and ink on vellum.
Below Carlos Diniz, Westlake Village, Mural, 1966.
McIntire and Quiros, engineers. Ink on vellum.
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