11 Facts About Amancio Williams

Amancio Williams is among his country's leading exponents of modern architecture.

Amancio Williams's father, Alberto Williams, was a well-known composer of chamber music and the founder of the Buenos Aires Music Conservatory.

Amancio Williams graduated in 1941 and created a portfolio of numerous prospective designs, though he found buyers for only a few, and among these was a modernist residence in Mar del Plata commissioned by his own father.

The elder Williams had purchased a 2 hectares property in what were then the wooded outskirts of the seaside city.

The concrete used in its construction was chemically weatherized at the facility, so done to allow its use in the design without the need for cladding, which Amancio Williams felt would take from the "honesty of the materials".

Amancio Williams was assigned by Le Corbusier to supervise construction for the Curutchet House, a residence designed in 1949 by the Swiss architect for Dr Pedro Curutchet, a prominent La Plata physician.

Amancio Williams was invited to display his ideas on acoustics at La Sorbonne, and the Dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Design, Walter Gropius, organized exhibits of his works in 1951 and 1955, on which latter occasion Williams was a guest lecturer.

Amancio Williams later employed the concept for the 1966 Bunge y Born exhibit at the La Rural Exposition grounds and in 1968 for the German Embassy, both in Buenos Aires, as well as for a monument to the reconstruction of Berlin.

Amancio Williams was inducted into the American Institute of Architects as an honorary member in 1962.

Amancio Williams was contracted by the Argentine government to design a self-contained city planned for Argentine Antarctica, though his design, presented in 1980, was never carried out.

Amancio Williams died in Buenos Aires in 1989 at age 76, and was buried in Recoleta Cemetery.