(1924-2003)

The day before his death of a heart attack, on 9 April, Abraham Zabludovsky presented the project for the Museo del Niño in Villahermosa, so fulfilling his wish of keeping himself at work until the very end. Born in Poland, Zabludovsky has been a point of reference for the architecture of the second half of the 20th century in his country of adoption, Mexico: as a builder (and occasional developer) of an important corpus of rationalist dwellings – from houses to residential complexes – and as an interpreter of modern heritage in the light of the pre-Columbian past. Together with his colleague and friend, Teodoro González de León, his associate since the sixties decade, Zabludovsky ‘coined’ a new Mexican monumentality in public and corporate buildings such as the Mexican embassy in Brasilia (1973), the central headquarters of Infonavit (1974) or the Museo Tamayo (1981). The National Arts Prize (1982), the gold medal at the World Architecture Biennial (1991) and the emeritus prize of Mexico’s architectural association are a few of the awards that he received in the course of his productive and coherent career.