From Line to Cluster
Welton Becket’s shopping center
for Diamond Bar (1964) was on
virgin territory near the freeway: a
disused movie ranch transformed
into an instant master planned
suburb. The retail village turned its
back on the postwar convention
of a linear mall within a parking
lot, already looking, like Westlake
Village, to more intimate urban
models. Though built on a flat
lot and to a more open scheme,
Diniz’s drawing evokes the pitched
roofs and staggered open plazas
of a Mediterranean hill town, with
a layered pedestrian topography
that echoes the hills behind.
Left Carlos Diniz, Diamond Bar
Shopping Center, Plaza View, 1966.
Welton Becket, architect.
Ink on vellum.
the dawn of computer animation — of the 500-year-old art of envi- escaped the supposed sterility of modernist scale and mass soci-
sioning new designs in pen and ink. The final product might have ety, the desperation analyzed in David Riesman’s 1950 book
been a print, a pamphlet, a panel presentation, a studio painting, a The Lonely Crowd. This set of disparate ideas, which took form in
poster or a doctored slide. Some of these, especially the screen prints the writing on urban life of Jane Jacobs and Kevin Lynch, began,
of the early ‘60s made with the Art Krebs Studio, are immensely by the mid ‘60s, to appear on the ground in such modern-dress
beautiful. Others, like his posters for the Rouse Company’s first inner re-stagings of the small town ideal as the Rouse Company’s Cross
city “festival marketplaces,” are brilliant pieces of social propaganda. Keys Village — a conjunction of scaled-down shopping precinct,
But it is in his pen and ink perspective drawings, on which all these community center and clustered dwellings — or their ideal new
final illustrations are based, that Diniz expresses his sense of how to walkable community — intimately scaled and socially and racially
portray a scheme most fluidly and with the most drama. mixed — in Columbia, Maryland. It was powerfully expressed in
Diniz called this “the art of building illusion,” and he saw himself the work of Aldo Rossi, with its revived respect for the historical
weaving together the many disparate sensibilities of its tradition: patterns of the city, and Robert Venturi, with its validation of the
the vitality captured along with documentary precision in Guardi’s everyday and accidental furnishings of the built landscape. For
Venice, Canaletto’s London, Catherwood’s Mayan ruins or the city- Diniz, it was the visionary British theorist and illustrator Gordon
scape of a Japanese print; the shadowy theater, the evocative and Cullen who spoke most eloquently to this new ideal of the densely
moody approaches that evoke space and shape with exaggerated animated townscape. Drawing on the illustrative techniques of
lighting of Piranesi, John Michael Gandy and Hugh Ferriss; and the newspaper advertising and posters, Cullen laid out ingeniously
clarity and cubistic simplicity of a counter-tradition, dating back to varied ideal skylines and plazas, in which differing scales and a
steel engravings of the neo-Classical era, that tried to capture space mixed history of uses converge as if by harmonious accident.
and form through the dynamic power of the line on blank paper Adapting Cullen’s language to the dynamism and scale of the
and that came to full bloom in such illustrations as Otto Wagner’s American scene and fusing it with the many traditions that preceded
for greater Vienna, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Wasmuth portfolio, Le it, Diniz’s visions have an imaginative and polemical force all their
Corbusier’s “Radial City” and Antonio Sant’Elia’s “New City,” a tech- own. As his buildings move from spacious grandeur to dense activ-
nique that matched — or perhaps even helped inspire — the clean ity, they also, very vividly, establish a dramatically changing idea
lines, transparency, open spaces and unadorned façades of the of what the modern city might be, and show how short a time it
buildings and ideal cityscapes that they portrayed. took to move from one sense of urbanism to another. Commissioned
Perhaps most important to Diniz’s evolving practice was the to portray sometimes quite rudimentary planning schemes as they
emergence, in the ‘50s and ‘60s, of equally visionary but newly might appear in final form, Diniz traced — and frequently, in fact,
picturesque or layered ways of foreseeing an urban future that proposed — how they would function; how they would be visually
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