Name Wenceslao Sarmiento Role Architect | ||
 | ||
Died November 24, 2013, Santa Monica, California, United States | ||
Structures Phoenix Financial Center | ||
Wenceslao Alfonso Sarmiento (September 22, 1922 – 24 November 2013), also known as W.A. Sarmiento is a Peruvian-born American modernist architect.
Sarmiento studied in various locations in South America, for eighteen months in the office of Oscar Niemeyer, before coming to the United States. He served as the head designer for the Bank Building Corporation of America from 1951 through 1961, after which he founded his own sixty-person Sarmiento Associates office based in St. Louis, Missouri. He retired in 1980.
Sarmiento designed hundreds of banks and other buildings in the postwar years of bank modernization in downtowns, and the construction of new suburban bank towers. His larger work appears as crisp International Style with a visible influence from Niemeyer, perhaps most obvious in his largest project, the 1968 Phoenix Financial Center on Central Avenue in Phoenix, Arizona. The smaller branch banks tend to be more playful, eye-catching, Googie projects.
Sarmiento lived in Santa Monica, California and was still active in the preservation of his buildings until his death in 2013.