José Rafael Moneo, born in 1937 in Tudela, Navarra, obtained his architectural degree in 1961 from the ETSAM (Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Madrid). While still a student, he worked with Francisco Javier Sáenz de Oiza. When he had completed his degree, he went to Hellebæck, Denmark, to work with Jørn Utzon. From 1984 to 1990 Moneo was chairman of the architecture department of the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. Moneo 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 he won the Pritzker Prize in architecture, and in 2003 he accepted the British Royal Medal of Architecture. 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, the National Bank of Spain and the Museo del Prado. These projects represent the best of Spanish efforts to build a 21st-century public infrastructure. 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. Outside Spain, Moneo's most notable projects the Davis Museum and Cultural Center at Wellesley, Massachusetts, the Audrey Jones Beck Building at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Texas, the New Studios Building at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, the Museum of Modern Art and Architecture in Stockholm, and the Arenberg Campus Library of the Catholic University of Leuven in Louvain-la-Neuve have attracted much attention. The new Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels in Los Angeles has drawn more than one million visitors in the first year it opened.

Photographs by: Duccio Malagamba