Román Fresnedo Siri

He is best known for designing major civic buildings throughout South America and the United States, including the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) headquarters in Washington, D.C., and the Palacio de la Luz in Montevideo.

Román Fresnedo Siri was born in 1903 in Salto, Uruguay, a small river city about 300 miles northwest of Montevideo on the border with Argentina.

The university's architecture school was then dominated by professor Joseph Paul Carré, a French architect who lived and taught in Uruguay from 1907 until his death in 1941.

Scale, contrasts, rhythm, proportion, the combinations of forms and volumes—all the qualities that define a work of art cannot be arbitrarily grouped; they must co-exist in intimate and harmonious relation.

An iconic early example of the movement was Brazil's Ministry of Education and Health building (1937), designed by Lucio Costa and Oscar Niemayer with Le Corbusier as consultant.

[5][6] A decade later, Niemayer and Julio Vilamajo of Uruguay (who had joined the architecture faculty in Montevideo during Fresnedo Siri's final year of study) would be the sole Latin American representatives on the design team for the United Nations headquarters building in New York.

In 1938, together with fellow Uruguayan architect Mario Muccinelli, Fresnedo gained his first major commission by winning the competition to build a new complex for his alma mater's School of Architecture in Montevideo.

During his period of study in the 1920s, Fresnedo Siri was an enthusiast of Frank Lloyd Wright's work, embracing the ideas of “organic architecture”, or the harmonious integration of the built environment with its natural setting so that a building's design and placement, its furnishings and landscaping together comprised a unified whole.

In addition to New York City, his stops included Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, and Washington, as well as the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan—the first building designed in the U.S. by fellow modernist Eliel Saarinen.

The Palacio de la Luz was an early example in Uruguay of a large, centrally air conditioned building with hermetically sealed windows.

In 1951, Fresnedo Siri won an international competition to design a horse racing complex in Porto Alegre, a major city of southern Brazil.

Brazilians today regard it as a landmark example of South American modernist architecture; the municipal government of Porto Alegre listed it as protected cultural historical patrimony in 2003.