LANZA Atelier
LANZA Atelier | 1973–2021, Concéntrico Festival, Logroño, Spain, 2021. Image credit: Josema Cutillas
The Architectural League’s annual Emerging Voices program spotlights North American architects, landscape architects, and urban designers who have significant bodies of realized work and the potential to influence their field.
Isabel Abascal and Alessandro Arienzo of LANZA Atelier won a 2023 award.
Isabel Abascal and Alessandro Arienzo founded LANZA Atelier in Mexico City in 2015. Initially oriented toward exhibition design, the practice’s portfolio has since expanded to include private residential and commercial projects, along with several public commissions. Ranging from research and teaching to furniture design to buildings, LANZA’s work expresses an inventiveness, a sensitivity to context, and a compositional refinement that spans scales and forms. In the words of its founders, the practice aims “to find and contribute to the beauty of the world.”
Projects include:
- A Table for Hundreds, a curving installation that commemorates the forced displacement of more than a thousand Mexican-American families from Los Angeles’s Chez Ravine neighborhood in the 1950s
- Forest House, a private residence built with artisanal bricks in a pine forest near Mexico City
- Public Bathrooms and Kiosks, a series of public bathrooms that double as shade pavilions along a bicycle track in Mexico City.
LANZA Atelier won the 2017 Architectural League Prize for Young Architects + Designers and received nominations for the Debut Award of the Lisbon Triennale, the Ibero-American Architecture Biennial Award, and the Mies Crown Hall Award for Emerging Architects. The practice’s work has been shown at SFMOMA, the São Paulo Architecture Biennial, and the Concéntrico Architecture Festival.
Isabel Abascal holds a bachelor’s and master’s degree in architecture from The Higher Technical School of Architecture of Madrid and has studied at the Technical University of Berlin and the Vastu Shilpa Foundation in Ahmedabad. For two years, she served as the executive director of LIGA, Space for Architecture. She teaches at Anahuac University and São Paulo’s School of the City.
Alessandro Arienzo holds a master’s degree in architecture from the Ibero-American University (IBERO). He has designed several exhibitions at major institutions in Mexico and Spain, and has published a series of books on his architectural research. Arienzo received a Young Creators Grant from Mexico’s National Endowment for Culture and the Arts (FONCA).
