Landmarking the Horizon
Craig Ellwood’s Art Center campus (built in 1974) placed the functions
of an entire college on a single narrow bridge. Diniz shows the center
articulated and characterized; how their densities, sit-
straddling the hills above the city like the Hollywood sign, a monument
ing and choreography would be perceived; and how
to the persistent horizontality and transparency of the region’s landscape
their social patterns of occupancy and interaction
and architecture.
might work. This may not have been something the
Above Carlos Diniz, Art Center Campus, Perspective View, 1968. Craig
designer or developer intended or dwelled on, but
Ellwood & Associates, architects, with James Tyler and Stephen
Woolley. Ink on vellum.
it did become what the public saw, and, as a result,
what we came to expect the modernized city to sup-
ply. Focusing on what lay around, upon or between
buildings as much as on the structures themselves
— open foregrounds, vistas, motion — Diniz began
by emphasizing the mammoth scales of the new
architecture, the soaring sensation that characterized
this long-deferred realization of the modern metrop-
olis, both glamorizing and lightening its impact by
stressing transparency and reflection. But as the era
moved on, he used his brilliant figure draftsman, Jay
Campus as Model Community
An equally unconventional model of the
campus as an ideal creative environ-
ment is beautifully illustrated in Diniz’s
portrayal of the five-layered sequence
of private and communal spaces, indoor
workrooms and outdoor terraces at
Skidmore Owings & Merrill’s MCA
“Garden Offices.” Built in Universal City
in 1973–75, MCA walled itself off from
the surrounding chaotic mix of freeway,
theme park, studios and parking lots,
setting up a hotel tower at one end to
serve as landmark and allowing the
200,000 square feet of working space
to cascade beneath it in an enclosed
topographic world of its own, each pri-
vate office open to a light-filled garden
community beyond its window wall.
Right top Carlos Diniz, MCA, Main
Plaza, 1973. Marc Goldstein for
Skidmore, Owens & Merrill, architects.
Ink on vellum.
Right bottom Carlos Diniz, MCA,
Office Interior, 1973. Marc Goldstein for
Skidmore, Owens & Merrill, architects.
Ink on vellum.
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