Isabel Martínez Abascal is a Mexico City–based architect and writer. In 2015, she founded the architecture studio LANZA Atelier, 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.
Martínez 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, Martínez 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). She has also contributed to publications such as DOMUS, Avery Review,Arquine, Wallpaper*, and the UNAM Journal, among others. In 2023, Martínez Abascal was a Harvard GSD Wheelwright Prize finalist with her project, Mother Architecture: Shaping Birth.
Martínez 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.
