González de León studied at UNAM's national architecture school from 1942 to 1947, then spent eighteen months in Le Corbusier's Paris atelier, working on the Marseille Unité d'Habitation and the Saint-Dié factory project, before returning to Mexico and founding, with Abraham Zabludovsky, one of the country's most consistent architectural partnerships. From 1974 they built the COLMEX headquarters, the INFONAVIT headquarters, the Universidad Pedagógica Nacional and the Rufino Tamayo Museum in a single recognisable material: board-formed, bush-hammered concrete left entirely unclad, arranged as terraced, cantilevered volumes that step down sloped sites rather than standing as free blocks. Their shared 1982 National Award of Science and Arts recognised the Tamayo museum specifically; González de León later received the Union of International Architects' gold medal in 2008 and remained active until close to his death in 2016.
