The Ideal of the Urban Village
Frank Gehry and Gruen Associates’ Santa Monica Place, only part over a decade before such overweening initiatives to transform the
of which was built, was designed for the Rouse Company at the urban landscape could be proposed again, and by that time, very
same time as Broadway Plaza. It would have taken over the entire different sensibilities, urban circumstances and economic factors
depressed downtown core of this beach city to set up a new mix were coming into play. The genuine ideal of new towns clustered
of buildings and uses, streets and pedestrian plazas, producing, as around landscape and leisure disintegrated into jerry-built suburban
conveyed in Diniz’s renderings, an intensely animated space in the tracts; the concept of shining new cities within the city disappeared
open plazas and an almost European feeling for the arcaded city among the assertive banalities with which new financial centers
street in the closed ones. imposed themselves on docklands, railyards and industrial waste-
These ambitions to truly transform the traditional city ran land; and the scale-conscious transformation of downtown had
aground on the rocks of the energy crisis of the mid ‘70s: Broadway been replaced by the sentimentalization of the metropolis, as its
Plaza remained one among too few interventions to revive L.A.’s surviving historical moments were adapted to fit the standardized
recalcitrant downtown, while in Santa Monica only the enclosed patterns and services of the giant suburban mall. With that, the
shopping center — a set of high, arcaded promenades that modern- “Modern” lost its identity as an approach to living, and became
ized a traditional sense of the streetscape — was built. It would be simply another episode in the history of aesthetics.
Opposite Carlos Diniz, Santa Monica Place, Preliminary Third Street Elevation, 1973. Frank O. Gehry, architect, for Gruen Associates.
Ink on vellum.
Below Carlos Diniz, Santa Monica Place, Atrium Interior View, 1973. Frank O. Gehry, architect, for Gruen Associates. Ink on vellum.
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