MCA Masterplan

The beauty of Universal city is that the cumulative effect of haphazard developments — that started in 1912 with the exploitation of the flatlands for the new necessities of film making, and culminated in the eighties, when the existing Mountain was decapitated to create a further platform for development, now accommodates, more through accident than design, a unique urban condition: a seamless amalgam of production — the movies — and consumption — the Tours — that, in a city of artifice, has the rare virtues of authenticity and vitality.