Spanish Architect Captures Prestigious Design Honor

Jose Rafael Moneo of Madrid, an eclectic architect revered for his unusually wide range of accomplishments and his ability to connect the present with the past, is this year’s winner of the Pritzker Architecture Prize.

Known as the Nobel of architecture, the highly coveted honor bestows a $100,000 grant, a bronze medallion and--most important--the prestige of joining an elite international corps of Pritzker laureates.

Moneo’s most critically acclaimed work is the National Museum of Roman Art in Merida, constructed over the site of archeological excavations of Spain’s leading city during the Roman Empire. But his projects encompass residences, banks, art museums, a railway station, an airport, a sports stadium, a city hall and office buildings.

Most of his projects have been built in Spain. His only completed work in the United States is the Davis Museum and Cultural Center at Wellesley College in Wellesley, Mass., built in 1993, but he has designed a 185,000-square-foot addition to the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, scheduled to begin construction in January 1997. He is also one of five semifinalists selected earlier this month in a competition to design a new St. Vibiana’s Cathedral in a complex that will incorporate the historic building in downtown Los Angeles.

“I was very surprised. I didn’t think the prize would come to me,” Moneo, 58, said in a telephone interview from his office in Madrid. “I am delighted to no end that I have been selected, but the award brings responsibilities. It reminds me that I am not so young anymore and that my work has already arrived at a certain point. But I don’t want it to remain static. The challenge is to maintain the same interest and eagerness to go ahead with my work and do my best, as I did before I reached this canonical status.”

J. Carter Brown, chairman of the Pritzker jury and director emeritus of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, praised Moneo as “a major force for the art of architecture” whose work has “a kind of calm and a sense of quality and attention to detail that keeps him from being flamboyantly into the ‘isms.’ ”

His architecture is characterized by “a kind of clarity and a sense of the past in a totally modern idiom that makes it extremely distinguished,” Brown said. “His Museum of Roman Art in Merida lifts your spirit as you go into this extraordinary space, which allows you to look at some of the architectural fragments at the angles from which they were originally designed to be seen. His use of arches invokes the Roman heritage of that important archeological site and town.”

Citing another example of Moneo’s ability to incorporate a sense of history in thoroughly modern buildings, Brown said: “In the Atocha Railway Station [in Madrid] he uses brick and the technology of shelter that was the hallmark of 19th century railway stations, but he does it again in a totally 20th century idiom.”

Moneo was born in the small Spanish town of Tudela and earned his academic credentials at the Madrid University School of Architecture. He has taught at the universities of Barcelona and Madrid and he was chairman of the department of architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design from 1984 to 1990.

Commenting on the St. Vibiana competition in Los Angeles, Moneo said: “Whoever gets that job will have one of hardest subjects at the end of this century.” Other semifinalists are Frank O. Gehry of Los Angeles, the Morphosis firm headed by Thom Mayne of Santa Monica, Venturi Scott Brown and Associates of Philadelphia and Santiago Calatrava, a Zurich-based Spaniard.

Building a new cathedral in central Los Angeles would be a challenge in itself, but investing it with meaning in architectural terms complicates the project enormously, Moneo said. “Feelings about sacred architecture don’t exist anymore. We as architects have been asked to bring back memories and the presence that such buildings had in the past, but that isn’t easy to achieve today. It is very difficult to figure out what could link religious architecture of the past with what it could be in years to come.”

Moneo is willing to “run the risk” of tackling such a project, but “it would be one of the most difficult challenges of my career,” he said. “If I am selected, I will accept it gratefully, but I will feel liberated if it goes to someone else.”

The Pritzker Architecture Prize was established in 1979 by the Hyatt Foundation to honor living architects whose talent, vision and commitment have produced significant contributions to the man-made environment through the art of architecture.

Each year the award is presented in a different architecturally significant location. Moneo will receive his prize June 12 at the construction site of the Getty Center in Brentwood, designed by Richard Meier, the 1984 Pritzker laureate.