Teodoro González de León, a Mexican architect who designed modernist buildings that reference Mesoamerica’s ancient cities, died on September 16 in Mexico City at the age of ninety, Elisabeth Malkin of the New York Times reports.

“The No. 1 goal of architecture is to create useful objects,” González de León said. “We create useful objects for the city to experience them—but also so that those objects move us.”

Born in Mexico City in 1926, González de León studied at the National School of Architecture, where, as students, he and two peers won a design competition for the university’s new campus.

From 1948 to 1949, he worked as a draftsman in Le Corbusier’s Paris studio. Throughout his career back in Mexico, González de León designed government facilities, universities, office buildings, and museums, including the contemporary art museum Rufino Tamayo in 1981 in partnership with architect Abraham Zabludovsky.