Enrique Santillana Ciriani was born on December 27, 1965 in Miraflores, Lima, Peru. In 1985 he began his studies at the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism of the Ricardo Palma University in Lima.
A graduate architect in 1994, he left for France to begin a Corbusian journey that would introduce him to the professional and academic world in that country. The following year he entered the Paris-Belleville School of Architecture and continued the training provided by Henri Ciriani and the UNO Group. Since his arrival in Paris he has collaborated in various important architectural offices such as CHEMETOV-HUIDOBRO, Henri et Bruno GAUDIN, Henri CIRIANI, Jean Paul VIGUIER, DUBUS-RICHEZ, LAZO&MURE and Michel REMON, with the design and construction of homes, buildings and public facilities. At the same time he participated in international competitions and built two beach houses south of Lima in Peru.
In 2010, he began teaching architectural design alongside architect Lorenzo Piqueras and his group at the École Nationale Supérieure de l'Architecture de Paris-Belleville. That same year, he left for West Africa to settle in the Ivory Coast, where he built a mixed-use residential and commercial building in the capital, Abidjan, a multipurpose educational center for a youth association in the city of Adzopé, and a single-family home in the jungle in the southeast of the country.
In 2014, he returned to Lima after 20 years of living outside the country, to become a teacher in the Architecture courses at the University of Lima and the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru. He created his own office, ESARQUITECTURA, at the beginning of 2015. That same year, he was invited to Panama to teach at the School of Architecture and Design of Latin America and the Caribbean, ISTHMUS. In March 2015, he won the competition for the construction of the Social Sciences Complex of the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru, in association with TANDEM Arquitectos and Jonathan Warthon, a building nominated in 2017 for the Mies Crown Hall Prize of the Americas.
