planning agencies, and public into backing the schemes – are magnificently fluid, using movement, shadow, a touch of color, and the peopling of space to animate a static design. From the vast archive of Diniz’s practice, the exhibition selects examples of these perspective drawings, showing how they worked with architects and planners to establish the greatcity aspirations of Los Angeles from the final plan of Century City in 1962 – when the downtown core moved out – to the Grand Avenue schemes of 1980 – when after many false starts it began to move back in. Los Angeles in these years sputtered through successive phases of growth and decay, expansion and constraint, but we can see the city steadily moving away from the unabashedly vast panoramas, open plazas, and soaring scales of the Space Age toward the busy arcades, articulated layers, and street-like settings of the end of century.
STANDING APART Screen prints from the Krebs studio shows Diniz’s work early in the Sixties when, with the Hollywood studio system in free-fall and the city's major industries beginning to drift away, new projects began looking toward a denser city at a different level and with further aspirations toward metropolitan style and grandeur. Minoru Yamasaki's enormous Century Plaza hotel (1961-66) was conceived at an entirely modern scale, anchoring the western edge of Century City, a vast new office park on the back-lots of a major studio. There, in Welton Becket’s master plan, clustered high-rises, set above a huge mound of garage space, sat within a rectangular platform of their own, defying the 50-foot street front of the main arterial boulevards that had prevailed for over 40 years. »
CENTURY PLAZA HOTEL — LOWER LEVEL VIEW, 1964 MINORU YAMASAKI, ARCHITECT