More information about Moneo/más información sobre Moneo:
· discusión con Moneo en español
· interview with Moneo in English

Rafael Moneo has been selected to design the The Chace Center because of his quick and thorough understanding of the concept and the complicated design issues associated with it. José Rafael Moneo Arquitecto, his Madrid-based firm, is known for integrating provocative contemporary architecture into historic contexts. Prized as a national asset in Spain and now at the height of his career, Moneo is one of the world’s most important architects. He has won gold medals from the French Academy of Architecture and the International Union of Architects, the Arnold W. Brunner Memorial 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 Moneo won the Pritzker Prize in architecture and in 2003 accepted the British Royal Medal of Architecture. At the latter ceremony, 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, to his current projects adding to the National Bank of Spain and to the Museo del Prado. These projects represent the best of Spanish efforts to build a 21st-century public infrastructure that will meet the contemporary needs of one of Europe’s most dynamic economies. 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.

In the US, Moneo’s most notable projects in the last decade — the Davis Museum and Cultural Center at Wellesley, the Audrey Jones Beck Building at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the New Studios Building at Cranbrook — have attracted increasingly more attention, with his design for the new Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels (2002) in Los Angeles drawing more than one million visitors in the first year since it opened. These diverse accomplishments, coupled with his long teaching experience in design schools in Europe and at Harvard and Princeton, make Moneo the ideal candidate for the RISD commission.