Maria Luisa Dehesa Gomez Farias (Mexico, 1912-2009) was the first woman to receive her architect degree in Mexico and Latin America, breaking the traditionally man-designated space on the discipline in the country. She arrived in Mexico City in 1933 to study architecture at the old architecture school "La Real Academia de San Carlos" in Mexico City; where presenting a "strong and masculine" posture towards architecture and design, she graduated in 1937 as the first female architect out of 5 women in her generation of 113 students. Her approach to architecture from a social perspective would be defined early on in her career when she proposed her thesis "Artillery Barracks Type" as a response to the high criminality among sons of soldiers that lacked a proper housing to share with their parent who remained quartered in the Barracks. Her proposal for the construction of a social family housing unit shaped her future projects and almost 50 year trajectory where she would continue to focus on housing in government dependencies on an urban scale in Mexico City's Public Work Department.
Maria Luisa Dehesa
All our texts and many of our images appear under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike License (CC BY-SA). All our content is written and edited by our community.
taniatovartorres, March 20th, 2019