José Rafael Moneo, born in 1937 in Tudela, Na-varra, obtained his architectural degree in 1961 from the ETSAM (Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Madrid). While still a student, he worked with Francisco Javier Sáenz de Oiza. When he had completed his degree, he went to Hellebæck, Denmark, to work with Jørn Utzon, »whom I saw«, says Moneo, »as the legitimate heir of the masters of the heroic period«. From
1984 to 1990 Moneo was chairman of the architecture department of the Harvard University Graduate School of Design.
Moneo has won gold medals from the French Academy of Architecture and the International Union of Architects, the Arnold W. Brunner Me-morial Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Spanish government¿s highest honor, the Gold Medal for Achievement in the Arts. In 1996 he won the Pritzker Prize in architecture, and in 2003 he accepted the British Royal Medal of Architecture. Mohsen Mostafavi, chairman of the Architectural Association, noted that Moneo »is the closest embodiment we have of the idea of the Renaissance architect ¿ practitioner, teacher, theorist, critic, deeply knowledgeable on the arts. His work does not just delight the eye, but always provokes thinking.«
In Spain his mark is seen everywhere ¿ from the airport in Seville to the high-speed-train station in Madrid, the National Bank of Spain and the Museo del Prado. These projects represent the best of Spanish efforts to build a 21st-cen- tury public infrastructure. They also exemplify Moneo¿s devotion to the culture and architectural history of his native land, showing a clearly contemporary voice with a refined sensitivity to site and context.
Outside Spain, Moneo¿s most notable pro-
jects ¿ the Davis Museum and Cultural Center at Wellesley, Massachusetts, the Audrey Jones Beck Building at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Texas, the New Studios Building at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, the Museum of Modern Art and Archi-tecture in Stockholm, and the Arenberg Campus Library of the Catholic University of Leuven in Louvain-la-Neuve ¿ have attracted much attention. The new Cathedral of Our Lady of the An-gels in Los Angeles has drawn more than one million visitors in the first year it opened.
