Rafael Moneo
Rafael Moneo designed the National Museum of Roman Art in Mérida and Moderna Museet in Stockholm. His architecture is calm and adapted to its site, with care for material, light and history.
José Rafael Moneo Vallés was born in 1937 in Tudela in Navarre. He studied architecture in Madrid and worked for two years for Jørn Utzon in Denmark, while the Sydney Opera House was being designed. He then won a scholarship to the Spanish Academy in Rome. Back in Spain he taught in Madrid and Barcelona and built up his practice. From 1985 to 1990 he was chairman of the architecture department at Harvard, and he has had great influence as a teacher and writer.
Moneo’s breakthrough was the National Museum of Roman Art in Mérida, opened in 1986, built of brick in the Roman format with tall arches over the excavated remains of a Roman town. He converted Atocha station in Madrid, where the old train shed became a tropical garden, and designed the Pilar and Joan Miró Foundation on Mallorca and the Kursaal in San Sebastián, two glass blocks by the sea. In Stockholm he designed Moderna Museet and the Architecture Museum, and in Los Angeles the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels. He has also built an extension to the Prado Museum in Madrid.
Moneo received the Pritzker Prize in 1996, while Moderna Museet was being built. He has designed buildings in many countries but has always worked from the conditions of the site, without a recognisable signature style. His work in Stockholm has made him one of the foreign architects who have left their mark on Swedish architecture.