Manuel Gallego

Manuel Gallego Jorreto, born in Carballiño (Ourense), in 1936, has received the Spanish National Architecture Award promoted by the Ministry of Public Works, a distinction it bestows annually to “pay a tribute of admiration to an architect whose work or overall oeuvre has contributed significantly to enriching the social, technological, and sustainable aspects of Spanish architecture or urban planning.” The jury – including among its members architects like Rafael Moneo, Luis Fernández-Galiano, Elías Torres, José Antonio Martínez Lapeña, Fuensanta Nieto, and Manuel Blanco – decided unanimously to present the prize to Gallego, who already received the award in 1997, when it was given not to a career but to a specific work (in this case, the Fine Arts Museum of A Coruña). This time the National Award wished to commend a silent and equable career, anchored to its context, and which has managed to reinterpret the vernacular invariants in contemporary key; a career that is rigorous in form and poetic in its materials, at once laconic and civic, and that, for its contention, is still exemplary and necessary in the architectural panorama today.