Biography
Miguel Lawner Steiman is a Chilean architect. He trained and practised in Chile, serving as executive director of the Urban Improvement Corporation under the Allende government until the 1973 coup.
Following the coup, Lawner was detained and held in several concentration camps. After his release and exile, he reproduced detailed plans of the camps from memory, later publishing them in his 2003 book La vida a pesar de todo. He appeared as himself, credited as the Architect, in Patricio Guzmán’s 2010 documentary Nostalgia for the Light.
Lawner received the National Architecture Prize of Chile in 2019. His drawings and testimony have contributed to public documentation of the period.
