Born in Río Piedras and trained at Cornell, graduating in 1918, Carmoega was the first Puerto Rican to hold the post of State Architect, occupied inside the Department of the Interior from 1921 to 1936. Those fifteen years placed him in charge of the island's public building just as a United States territorial administration was writing its own institutions into stone. He inherited the half-built Capitol from earlier schemes by Frank Perkins and Adrian Finlayson and finished it in marble, opening in 1929. Away from that neoclassical commission his preference ran to Spanish Baroque and neo-Mudéjar vocabularies and glazed mosaic tile, an insistence on Hispanic inheritance under American sovereignty. After 1936 he worked for the Puerto Rico Reconstruction Administration on the Universidad de Puerto Rico campus, then in private practice from 1937. His archive of 144 projects is held by that university.
