Visualizing A New Los Angeles, 1962-81: The Architectural Renderings of Carlos Diniz

This portfolio is drawn from an exhibition at the Edward Cella Gallery in Santa Barbara that explores – through the drawings of one of the most important architectural illustrators of his time – the transformation of Los Angeles as it matured from a loose conurbation into the more self-conscious, consolidated, and monumental metropolis we know today.

CARLOS DINIZ

Carlos Diniz grew up in Los Angeles, studied Industrial Design at Art Center College and then joined Victor Gruen as part of a team developing promotional materials for the large-scale planning and shopping center schemes that Gruen pioneered in the Fifties. He left the firm six years later to found his own studio, collaborating with Art Krebs and other printmakers to produce the often elaborate visual documents employed to propose and promote new projects. With his work for the giant firms of SOM San Francisco, HOK St Louis and Minoru Yamasaki (whose World Trade Center Diniz portrayed in 1961), his practice rapidly expanded to a national level. He was soon providing promotional renderings for mega-projects throughout the world. By the 1980s, his picturesque approach to the downtown ‘festival place’ projects of the Rouse Company and to historicizing and humanizing massive schemes for London, Chicago and Boston made an enormous contribution to defining the urban aesthetic and sensibility that has marked the booming development of the last thirty years. Continue…