PAST EXHIBITION
Visualizing a New Los Angeles: Drawings of Carlos Diniz, 1962-1992
August 7, 2008—September 28, 2008

Press Release

Edward Cella Art+Architecture is proud to announce, Visualizing a New Los Angeles: Drawings of Carlos Diniz, 1962-1992, an exhibition that explores, through the architectural renderings of Carlos Diniz, how architecture and new developments changed the self-representation of the city of Los Angeles during its most formative years. Organized by preeminent architectural scholar Nicholas Olsberg, Visualizing a New Los Angeles: Drawings of Carlos Diniz, 1962-1992 documents how Diniz was called upon to envision large-scale projects throughout Southern California that progressively transformed the scale, the texture, and the character of the postindustrial city of Los Angeles and its suburbs, and established the design terms of wholly new ones.

The exhibition offers the first opportunity to comprehensively reevaluate the visual accomplishments of Carlos Diniz and document his involvement in creating architectural renderings for significant proposals that would reshape Los Angeles between 1962 and 1992. ECAA represents the estate of Carlos Diniz and will be exhibiting presentation drawings by Diniz, whose professional accomplishments have been inadequately recognized by scholars and the general public until now.

Diniz was arguably the last of the twentieth century’s great architectural delineators to work in the tradition of the hand-drawn perspective building. Diniz was commissioned by architects and planners to portray sometimes quite rudimentary schemes as they might appear in final form. Faithful to the architect’s design framework, Diniz was charged with dressing these naked concepts in movement, color, and light in order to communicate the potential of these preliminary schemes to investors, to planning and review agencies, and to the general public through highly articulated publicity efforts.  Diniz’s drawings trace – and frequently, in fact, propose -- how many of the signal developments of their time were to function; how they would be visually articulated and given character; how their densities, siting and choreography were perceived; and how their social uses and patterns of occupancy were conceived. Focusing on the birds-eye view, and on spaces, vistas, and movement between structures, the drawings trace – as no single architectural office archive could -- essential and surprisingly volatile patterns of development.

Curator Olsberg states, “Among the myriad schemes that he portrayed, Diniz is the one consistent voice. . . Subtly or willfully, it was Diniz’s vision of the packed and varied ‘humanist’ city that not only sold the projects themselves, but sold the next generation on a fixed concept of urban life.”  The exhibition will span Diniz’s concept drawings for a diverse range of projects and proposals that span from planned communities of Simi Valley and Westlake Village through Diniz’s presentation rendering for Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall.

For the exhibition, curator Olsberg has selected projects from the archive to illustrate four markedly different junctures in the city of Los Angeles’ development. Since the 1920s, the Los Angeles region had been less a city than a network of sub-centers. The first module entitled, Fluidity, Space and Scale, chronicles how, “with the completion of the freeway system, both dwelling and business could stretch out beyond the confines of the old conurbation. At the same time, suburb and sub-center alike became marked by a sense of structure, plan, and scale as developers had time to develop an infrastructure to support them,” states Olsberg. Perhaps exemplary of this dynamic period, is the proposal by the architectural firm of DMJM for a metabolic city on the shore of Santa Monica Bay, the core of which was a cylindrical tower rising up from the sea itself.  Unrealized at the scaled proposed, the Diniz renderings document this project that encapsulates the Space Age optimism and filmic fantasies of the era.

The second juncture of growth in L.A. continued upon the same concept. Stretching Up, Stretching Out, includes Diniz’s concept drawings for entirely new, regional planned community and suburbs like Simi Valley and Westlake Village. From 1942 to 1962 the population of the region had more than doubled. To accommodate such growth, entire new cities were proposed on the undeveloped tracts of land in the San Fernando Valley and in Orange County.  The intent of such schemes is, as Olsberg notes, to create “a city within the country, with country within the city.”  Through the illustrators’ vision of the designer’s intent, the twenty-first century city must be seen as a festival, the cultural building as a destination and landmark, and the suburb as a resort.  

During the next juncture Los Angeles began a period called Landmarking The City with Culture, 1962-65. Diniz’s collaboration with Frank Gehry for the home and studio of the fine-art printmaker Danziger, as well as architectural firm of Ladd and Kelsey’s proposal for the Pasadena Art Museum, “suggested a city more conscious of the arts, and proudly productive in them,” states Olsberg. He goes on to note, “Diniz’s portrayal of these cultural interpositions as solitary landmarks, radiating out to their surroundings, exactly renders their necessary self-importance. Studies for Diniz’s drawing for Becket’s abortive Theme Building’ for Century City -- which its developers actually described as ‘both cultural center and landmark’ capture all these ideas in one. Diniz himself noted that his instructions were to make it shine like a beacon of culture on a new acropolis.” Projects by Craig Elwood and Cesar Pelli are also featured.

The final thematic series in the exhibition explores the ideas of Revival, Rehabilitation, and Recovery 1972-75, 1980 within LA. The city saw itself at the time “as a repository of culture but as a generator of culture and style, and of culture as a moneymaking proposition,” states Olsberg. At the same time, LA had entered into a crisis. Olsberg says, “With the Olympics of 1984 in mind, two wildly ambitious schemes to restructure Bunker Hill move the mall out into the street, recasting Grand Avenue in the form of an elongated public plaza – a sort of Las Vegas strip set beneath commercial and mixed use towers  and studded with an artistic agenda. Here Diniz’s drawings track an extraordinary sequence of urban animation.”

The exhibition will present newly discovered information about Carlos Diniz who was born in Phoenix, Arizona in 1928. Diniz began his career with Victor Gruen Associates in 1952. In the approximately five years that he was at Gruen, Diniz became immersed in not only drawing, but in architectural design, planning and graphic presentation. In 1957, when Diniz left Gruen, he modeled his own studio after an architectural office. He began producing architectural illustrations, paintings, presentations, brochures and graphics in what he perceived to be a new and open field. In the early 1960’s Diniz met Minoru Yamasaki, who brought Diniz on board to illustrate the World Trade Center project in New York City which launched his career internationally. Ultimately, Diniz went on to become the preeminent renderers for the building boom of the 70’s and 80’s – active on four continents. He is one of the few Architectural Illustrators to be awarded an Honorary AIA. Diniz’s illustrations have been featured in magazines, shows, and exhibitions and he was the subject of an autobiography book entitled, Building Illusion: The Work of Carlos Diniz published in 1992. Diniz died in 2000 and in 2002 he was posthumously awarded the Pacific Design Center’s Stars of Design Award for Graphic Design.

Visualizing a New Los Angeles: Drawings of Carlos Diniz, 1962-1992 is being organized by architectural scholar Nicholas Olsberg. Olsberg is the former director of the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal and is independent curator of an upcoming exhibition at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles entitled, Between Earth and Heaven: The Architecture of John Lautner opening in May 2008. He has served as guest curator at a number of institutions, including the Whitney Museum’s exhibition, The American Century in 1999–2000.

Visualizing a New Los Angeles: Drawings of Carlos Diniz, 1962-1992 runs concurrently with a series of architectural exhibitions being held in and around Southern California.  In addition to the Lautner exhibition at the Hammer Museum, the University Art Museum of the University of California, Santa Barbara is exhibiting concurrently, A Beautiful Nothing: The Architecture of Edward A. Killingsworth from July 16 through October 12, 2008.The exhibition will feature approximately thirteen of L.A. architect Edward Killingsworth’s most provocative unrealized projects, including original drawings, architectural models, and photographs by internationally-noted California photographers including Julius Shulman and Marvin Rand.  Together these exhibitions substantially expand our understanding of the transformative and fluid state of architecture in Southern California in the decades of the 1960s through the 1980s.

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