Wenceslao Sarmiento

Wenceslao Alfonso Sarmiento (September 28, 1922 – 24 November 2013), also known as W.A. Sarmiento, was a Peruvian-born American modernist architect. .mw-parser-output .infobox-subbox{padding:0;border:none;margin:-3px;width:auto;min-width:100%;font-size:100%;clear:none;float:none;background-color:transparent}.mw-parser-output .infobox-3cols-child{margin:auto}.mw-parser-output .infobox .navbar{font-size:100%}body.skin-minerva .mw-parser-output .infobox-header,body.skin-minerva .mw-parser-output .infobox-subheader,body.skin-minerva .mw-parser-output .infobox-above,body.skin-minerva .mw-parser-output .infobox-title,body.skin-minerva .mw-parser-output .infobox-image,body.skin-minerva .mw-parser-output .infobox-full-data,body.skin-minerva .mw-parser-output .infobox-below{text-align:center}

Sarmiento lived in Santa Monica, California and was still active in the preservation of his buildings until his death in 2013.

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 studied in various locations in South America, for eighteen months in the office of Oscar Niemeyer, before coming to the United States. In 1951 while visiting his sister-in-law in Missouri he rear ended an architect who worked for the St. Louis based Bank Building & Equipment Corporation of America. He was hired soon after and served as the head designer for the corporation from 1951 through 1961, after which he founded his own sixty-person Sarmiento Associates office based in St. Louis, Missouri. He relocated to Santa Monica California in the 1970s. He retired in 1980.