Isabel Abascal is a Mexico City–based architect and writer. In 2015, she founded the architecture studio LANZA, along with Alessandro Arienzo. The Mexico City-based practice insists on calling exhibition design “exhibition architecture,” and approaches its residential and public projects with the same risk-taking approach that they foster with their work in the realm of the gallery and museum.
Abascal has collaborated with the studios SANAA (Tokyo), Aranguren and Gallegos (Madrid), Anupama Kundoo (Berlin) and Pedro Mendes da Rocha (Sao Paulo). She was a design studio professor in the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism, Escola da Cidade, in Sao Paulo (2009-2014), Anáhuac Univeristy (2019-2020) and Visiting Professor at Kent State University (2021).
From 2015 to 2017, Abascal was the Executive Director of LIGA, Espacio para Arquitectura, a platform dedicated to the dissemination and discussion of Latin American architecture. There, she curated myriad exhibitions, and co-edited the book Exposed Architecture (Park Books, 2018).
Abascal proposal, “Mother Architecture: Shaping Birth” was a Harvard GSD 2023 Wheelwright Prize finalist and her project “Investigaciones sobre creación y procreación” was been awarded the National Fund for the Arts “Coinversiones” Prize in 2023.
Abascal studied architecture at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, the Technische Universität in Berlin, and at the Vastu Shilpa Foundation in Ahmedabad, under Balkrishna Doshi.
