Every year the Praemium Imperiale, sponsored by the Japan Art Association, is awarded to internationally outstanding artists in five fields: painting, sculpture, music, theater/film and architecture. The 2017 honoree for architecture, Rafael Moneo, has previously won the (even a bit more exalted) Pritzker Prize in 1996 and the Gold Medal of the Royal Institute of British Architects in 2003. On October 18 in Tokyo, Moneo is to receive this additional high honor, along with a purse of 15 million yen (about $136,000).
While correctly identified as a Spanish architect, based in Madrid, Moneo has completed works internationally ‑ some of the most prominent ones here in the United States. And his American connection is reinforced by his service from 1985 to 1990 as Dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where he still teaches.
As a youth, Moneo was reportedly interested in philosophy and painting, but he was influenced by his industrial designer father to study architecture. Graduating from the Madrid University School of Architecture in 1961, he traveled throughout Europe, worked for the great master Jorn Utzon in Denmark (think Sydney Opera House) and spent a two-year fellowship at the Spanish Academy in Rome. He seems to have always perceived design in the larger context of history and place.
Back in Madrid, his early career activities included teaching at his alma mater, founding and writing for the magazine Arquitectura Bis, and organizing conferences, which brought him into contact with such notable contemporaries as Peter Eisenman from the U.S., Alvaro Siza from Portugal, and Renzo Piano from Italy. His breadth of interests and contacts no doubt contributed to his success as dean at Harvard.
Moneo’s first internationally noted building, Bankinter in Madrid, was completed when he was 40 – an early age for a breakout work by an architect. Other major commissions followed, but the pace of his practice picked up considerably with the widespread admiration for his National Museum of Roman Art in Merida in 1986. Modern in concept yet executed with brick walls and arches, the museum
symbolically resurrects ancient structures whose ruins share its site. Commissions followed for office buildings, university and museum structures, and even a cathedral – a very rare opportunity in modern times.
Moneo’s architecture has much in common with works of the revered American Louis Kahn (1901-1974), who was much admired internationally when Moneo was shaping his design identity. Like Kahn’s buildings, Moneo’s often celebrate the solidity of masonry and other highly durable materials. And like Kahn, Moneo has always shaped his buildings in relation to their surroundings, not just complementing neighboring structures and spaces but melding them into community-scaled compositions.
Accordingly, Moneo has resisted the recent tendency to design buildings as autonomous, large-scaled sculptures, conceiving them rather as spaces for individual people to experience. Most memorable about his Davis Art Museum at Wellesley, for instance, isn’t its relatively bland exterior (respectfully deferring to a neighboring older landmark by architect Paul Rudolph), but the experience of traversing its simple yet grandly proportioned stairs and savoring the gentle daylight sifting down from its rooftop skylights.
At his Los Angeles cathedral, the lofty, softly daylighted interiors are frankly more impressive than the fortress-like brick-walled exterior. The cathedral also demonstrates how sensitively Moneo relates his buildings to spaces outside them. The surrounding plaza and gardens Moneo laid out here are as vital to the overall experience as the building itself (for those who haven’t been there, images readily found online hint at the richness of experience there). His modestly scaled city hall in the Spanish city of Murcia combines with the equally modest plaza it faces to form a remarkably strong urban center.
Moneo’s notable buildings in America include:
>Davis Art Museum, Wellesley College, Wellesley, Massachusetts, 1993
>Audrey Jones Beck Building, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 2000
>Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, Los Angeles, 2002
>Chase Center, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, 2008
>Northwest Corner Building, Columbia University, New York, 2010
>Neuroscience Institute, Princeton University in New Jersey, 2014
Among his prominent commissions back in Spain are:
>Bankinter building, Madrid, 1977
>City Hall, Logrono, 1981
>National Museum of Roman Art, Merida, 1986
>Prevision Espanola office building, Seville, 1988
>Seville Airport terminal, 1991
>City Hall, Murcia, 1991-1998
>Atocha Railroad Station expansion/remodeling, Madrid, 1992
>Miro Foundation museum, Palma de Mallorca, 1992
>L’Illa Diagonal building (with Manuel Sola-Morales), Barcelona, 1993
>L’Auditori music center, Barcelona, 1999
>Kursaal Congress Center and Auditorium, San Sebastian, 1999
>Maternity and Pediatric Hospital, Madrid, 2003
>Science Museum, Valladolid, 2003
>Expansion of the Prado museum, Madrid, 2007
>Library at the University of Deusto, Bilbao, 2009
>Museum at the University of Navarra, Pamplona, 2015
And, so far, a few completed works in other countries:
>Moderna Museet and Swedish Centre for Art and Design, Stockholm, 1998
>Library of Sciences, University of Leuven, Belgium, 2000
The other four winners of this year’s Praemium Imperiale constitute an interesting commentary on today’s international culture.
>Theater/film: Mikhail Baryshnikov, dual citizen of Latvia and U.S. – universally acclaimed ballet dancer, director, and actor on stage, film, and TV; even more than Moneo, one who might seem overdue for this honor.
>Sculpture: El Anatsui, Nigeria – creator of large-scale abstract drape-able sculpture composed of discarded metal such as bottle caps; little known in the U.S. till the 1990s, but since seen in all of our major art museums.
>Painting: Shirin Neshat, Iran-born, New York based – arrived in the U.S. at 17, studied art at UC Berkeley, widely known for her videos, films and photographs depicting Middle Eastern and American life.
>Music: Youssou N’Dour, Senegal – known for his performances mixing influences of traditional Senegalese music, jazz, soul, Latin, and even hip hop, in songs that deal with a vast range of social issues; winner of a 2004 Grammy.
Among the 29 Praemium Imperiale winners to date for architecture are the American architects I.M. Pei (first honoree, 1989), Frank Gehry, Richard Meier, and Steven Holl. Design honorees from other countries include James Stirling, Norman Foster, and Zaha Hadid of England, Charles Correa of India, Renzo Piano of Italy, Tadao Ando and Fumihiko Maki of Japan, Jean Nouvel of France, Rem Koolhaas of the Netherlands, and Ricardo Legorreta of Mexico – all of whom have completed significant works in the United States.