Wenceslao Sarmiento
architect (1922–2013)
Wenceslao Alfonso Sarmiento (September 28, 1922 – 24 November 2013), also known as W.A. Sarmiento, was 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. 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.
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.
“Wenceslao Sarmiento” enters the record as architect (1922–2013). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Wenceslao, Sarmiento and architect can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Chronology provides the most reliable spine for this subject; interpretation should follow only after identities and dates are secure. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 9, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q3912867. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1922, 2013, 1951 and 1961.
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This entry incorporates text from “Wenceslao Sarmiento” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.