Rafael Moneo

The young architect who travelled to Rome with a grant from the Academia de España has returned, years later, to receive an Italian accolade to add to the other distictions of his extensive career. Rafael Moneo (1937) shared the 1998 Antonio Feltrinelli artistic prizes with the filmmaker Michaelangelo Antonioni, the theatre director Luigi Squarzina, the painter Carlo Maria Mariani and the sculptor Giuliano Vangi. Although Moneo’s acceptance lecture under the title The Profession of the Architect was more general than specific, encompassing the whole century, it is his museum output that led to this new distinction. His intense, uninterrupted relationship with art and its containers has crystallized in works like the Roman Art Museum in Merida, the Pilar and Joan Miró Foundation in Mallorca, the Thyssen Foundation, or most recently, the Museum of Art and Architecture in Stockholm. Facing Moneo in the next millennium, one of his biggest challenges to date will be the remodelling and extension of the Prado Museum; a commission won after a polemical competition, and where he will need all his urban intuition and architectural culture.