Vast archive of famed architectural illustrator Carlos Diniz is now housed at UCSB’s Art, Design & Architecture Museum
Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. Boston’s Fanuiel Hall. Union Station in Washington D.C. The World Trade Center. These landmark, iconic developments have something in common: Long before they were constructed, they came to life through art by famed architectural illustrator Carlos Diniz.
Described as the “last great architectural illustrator to work in the techniques and materials of the hand-drawn perspective,” Diniz touched thousands of projects around the world, for some of the world’s best architects, across his four-decade career. Thanks to a gift from his family, the vast archive of work by Diniz, who died in 2001, is now part of the permanent collection of UC Santa Barbara’s Art, Design & Architecture Museum.
“Diniz called his work the ‘art of illusion,’ and his archive attests to his skill and the significant role his studio played in helping architects and developers finalize and sell their concepts to clients,” said Jocelyn Gibbs, curator of the museum’s architecture and design collection.
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Architectural historian, archivist and curator Nicholas Olsberg, who played a key role in getting the archive to UCSB, once wrote of Diniz’s skill in “articulating a particular backdrop … in intimate ground-level vignettes, which infused his drawings with ideas about the aesthetic character of the city, the resort or the suburb.”
Said Gibbs, “Diniz was important for several reasons: His great skill as a renderer and draftsman; his knowledge and interest in modernism; and the fact that he established his office at the right time, when large urban projects were being built in Los Angeles and other cities.
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