Ramírez Vázquez trained at Mexico's National School of Architecture and spent his career moving between private commissions and direct state appointments, eventually holding cabinet-level responsibility for the 1968 Mexico City Olympics and for Mexico's basic-education textbook programme. His buildings for the state read as a coherent public architecture: reinforced concrete, generous daylight and, repeatedly, a wide courtyard organised around a single dramatic structural gesture, as in the cantilevered concrete umbrella that roofs the National Museum of Anthropology. He worked with a changing roster of co-authors, most often Rafael Mijares Alcérreca, rather than as a sole auteur, and his built output — museums, stadiums, embassies, a new basilica — is unusually large for having been produced largely inside government commissions rather than the open market.
