The architecture studio LANZA was founded in 2015 by Isabel Abascal and Alessandro Arienzo and is based in Mexico City. The leitmotiv of their practice is to find and contribute to the beauty of the world.
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LANZA’s first solo show, New Work, took place at SF MOMA in 2018. The office’s work has also been exhibited at the Latin American Architecture Biennial 2023, the 12th São Paulo Arch.Biennial, the Lisbon Triennial 2019 and Concéntrico Festival in Spain 2021. The studio has presented their work at Syracuse University 2025 —where they were Visiting Professors—, CU Denver 2024, ETSA Madrid 2023, Cal Poly Pomona as part of the VDL House Residency Program 2022, Constructing Practice Symposium at Columbia University 2019, among others.
LANZA has been nominated for the 2016 Ibero American Architecture Biennial Award and the Mies Crown Hall Award for Emerging Architects, MIT Chicago, 2016 and 2022, and for the Brick Award 2021. The office is one of the winners of the Young Architects Prize 2017 and the Emerging Voices Award 2023 from the Architectural League of New York which described their multimodal work as one that “expresses an inventiveness, a sensitivity to context, and a compositional refinement that spans scales and forms.”
The studio is today working on industrial design, residential projects, cultural spaces and public infrastructure projects.
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Isabel Abascal graduated as an architect from the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid. She studied at the Technische Universität in Berlin and at the Vastu Shilpa Foundation in Ahmedabad (India) by Balkrishna Doshi. She was design studio professor for six years at Escola da Cidade, in Sao Paulo (2009-2014), Anáhuac University (2019-2020) and Visiting Professor at Kent State University (2021). From 2015 until 2017, she was executive director of LIGA, a platform dedicated to the exhibition and discussion of Latin American architecture and co-edited the book Exposed Architecture published by Park Books. She has been a Harvard GSD Wheelwright Prize finalist with her project Mother Architecture: Shaping Birth and she has received grants from both the Mexican Fund for the Arts (2022) and the Spanish Ministry of Housing and Urban Agenda (2025) to continue her ongoing research on spaces for birth.
Alessandro Arienzo studied architecture at the Universidad Iberoamericana. He explores the different possibilities within architectural practice by developing hand-drawing and publishing projects such as the Housetypes book series. In 2017, he was a recipient of the National Fund for the Arts Young Creators Prize. With this grant, he developed an investigation on the Security and Citizen Participation Modules network, whose result became part of the SFMOMA permanent collection in 2018. Several of his designs have been showcased institutionally, like A family of 4 which is today part of the Denver Art Museum collection.
Collaborators
Present: Genevieve Parkes, Francesco Fiorillo, Alejandro Márquez.
Past: Alejandra Richard, Roberto Domínguez, Henry Peters, Fernanda Gómez, Diego Gahu, Milena Fischer, Francesca Motte, Sofia Valdovinos, Beatriz Sallowiczs, Lucía Font, Tatiana Valente, Manuela Leboreiro, Maïlys Sourgen, Lili Carr, Isabel Palacios, Jessica Hernández, Celina Bonadeo.