Tonny Zwollo

Tonny Zwollo (born 1942) is a Dutch architect who has worked since 1964 in the Americas. In addition to designing and building over 35 schools in Mexico, she designed the largest indigenous market in South America, in Otavalo, Ecuador. Her approach to architecture is to build what is useful for the local community. Besides schools, she has built a hotel, tourist villages and a swimming pool to boost employment of residents in Oaxaca, Mexico.

Biography Tonny Zwollo was born on 1 February 1942 in Amstelveen, the Netherlands. She was the daughter of the goldsmith, Marinus Zwollo. She graduated in 1964 with a degree in architecture from the Delft University of Technology, but found it difficult to find work as a female architect in the Netherlands. That same year, Zwollo accepted an offer to work for the Mexican government building schools. Initially employed in Mexico City, she found bias against working with a woman there too and requested that she be transferred to more remote areas. She was sent to Oaxaca, where she had to convince the local villagers to work for her, without pay, to build the schools for their communities. Often, to get supplies to the sites, they had to build airstrips as well. Within two years, she had built nearly 30 airstrips and 35 schools. Her work was featured in Life magazine in 1967. She completed her work with the Mexican government in 1968, graduated in 1970 with a degree in engineering and received the Prix d'Excellence Award for her work. She completed her dissertation entitled, Fantasy and architecture, and it was published in English, Spanish and Dutch in 1975. In 1976, Zwollo returned to Oaxaca and worked on a collaborative project to restore the Santa Catalina Convent with architect Martín Ruíz Camino. winning Zwollo an additional Prix d'Excellence Award, from France. In 1993, Zwollo and Ruíz published a book about their projects first in Spanish and then under the English title, The Lost Paradise: Architecture and Ecology in the Oaxaca Valley .

Zwollo was appointed as a consultant in 1996 by Diódoro Carrasco Altamirano, Governor of Oaxaca, for special projects.

Published works