Carlos Diniz was born in Phoenix, Arizona while his Brazilian father and German Pennsylvanian mother were relocating from New Orleans to Los Angeles. Showing early promise in the arts, Carlos was featured as a young teen in a Paramount Pictures “short subject film” because of his uncanny ability to recreate historic guns in model form.

Stationed in Venice, Italy during WWII, Carlos made his first sketches of the buildings and architecture with which he would remain enraptured at his life’s end. In 1948, he enrolled in Industrial Design program at Art Center School, but fate intervened when he was invited to spend a weekend at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin West. After that weekend, Carlos had no doubt over the direction his future would take.

Working as an artist for various architectural studios, Carlos found employment at Victor Gruen Associates in 1952. In the approximately five years that he was at Gruen, Carlos became immersed in not only drawing, but in architectural design, planning and graphic presentation. In 1957, when Carlos left Gruen to establish his own studio, he modeled it after an architectural office, and began production of architectural illustrations, paintings, presentations, brochures and graphics in what he perceived to be a new and very open field.

Among the first commissions his new studio received was a house that Frank O. Gehry designed for graphic designer Lou Danziger. Danziger was interested in a technique that would allow the rendering to be used as a multiple graphic reproduction. This led Carlos to the development of the silk-screened serigraphs that he was to employ in many future commissions. It also necessitated the formations of a division of Carlos Diniz Associates devoted exclusively to the development of catalogues, posters, brochures and other presentational graphics offered as additional services to architects.

In the early 1960’s Carlos met Minoru Yamasaki. Yamasaki was a great fan of Carlos’ work, and so brought him on board as “Project Recording Artist” to work on an exciting and innovative project, the World Trade Center in New York. In Carlos’ own words, “I was invited to visit his studio in Birmingham, Michigan. Yamasaki showed me a model so tall it pierced the ceiling of his studio and left me agog. How to make this project look right in scale with its surroundings was only one of the problems.” Carlos did indeed accomplish that and through the resulting fame, became the preeminent renderer for the building boom of the 70’s and 80’s.

Carlos is one of the few Architectural Illustrators to be awarded an Honorary AIA. Transcending the scope of its intent as a presentational work for architects, Carlos’ work has been featured in magazines, shows and exhibitions and was the subject of an autobiography book entitled, Building Illusion, the Work of Carlos Diniz published in 1992. His rendering of the George C. Page Museum in Los Angeles is part of their permanent collection and has been on exhibition there for 30 years. His serigraphs have been featured in gallery shows as examples of late 21^st century graphic art. In 2002, Carlos Diniz was posthumously awarded the Pacific Design Center’s Stars of Design Award for Graphic Design. In 2005, Diniz’s rendering of General Electric Pavilion - New York World's Fair 1964-65, was included in the 100^th anniversary of Welton Becket and Associates at Archlight.  The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) has recently acquired several works of Diniz and will feature them in their Pacific Time project entitled Living in a Modern Way.