ÁLVARO SIZA AND STEVEN HOLL WIN PRIZES FOR ARCHITECTURE
On Tuesday, the Portuguese architect Álvaro Siza was awarded the Royal Gold Medal by the Royal Institute of British Architects, reports The Guardian. Siza is regarded by some as the greatest architect Portugal has ever produced, writes Robert Booth, although he is not as well known in Britain: His only British building to date was a temporary pavilion for the Serpentine Gallery in London in 2006. His influence on British architects through buildings in Portugal such as the Adega Mayor winery and the Evora housing development, built after the end of the Portuguese dictatorship in 1977, has been far greater. His style blends modernism’s free organization of spaces with vernacular architecture, so he might use whitewashed stone in Portugal or brick in the Netherlands. That approach has been embraced by a generation of architects including Caruso St. John and Tony Fretton, who have rejected the high-tech movement pioneered by Lord Rogers and Lord Foster and their tendency to use similar components wherever they build in the world. Siza follows Frank Gehry, Herzog & de Meuron, and Frei Otto as recent foreign winners of the prize, which is personally approved by the queen and often regarded as British architecture’s most prestigious prize. “Álvaro Siza is a profoundly complete architect who defies categorization,” said Sunand Prasad, the president of the Royal Institute of British Architects. “This is an architecture in which an economy of expressive means is combined with an abundance of spatial revelation.”
In other news, the National Art Club in New York City honored architect Steven Holl with the Gold Medal for Achievements in Architecture yesterday. Holl was born in 1947 in Bremerton, Washington. He graduated from the University of Washington and pursued architecture studies in Rome in 1970. In 1976, he joined the Architectural Association in London and established Steven Holl Architects in New York City. Notable work includes the Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki; the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City; and Linked Hybrid in Beijing. Holl has also been recognized with some of architecture’s most prestigious awards and prizes. Most recently, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art received the AIA 2008 Design and Building Type Awards and the 2008 AIA Honor Award for Architecture.
