Portuguese Architect Siza Wins Pritzker : Architecture: Honoree is known for adapting Modernist principles to buildings that respect traditions of Portugal.

Portuguese architect Alvaro Siza has won the 1992 Pritzker Architecture Prize. The prestigious award, known as the Nobel of architecture, includes a $100,000 grant, to be presented on May 14 in Chicago.

Siza, 58, is known for adapting Modernist principles to buildings that respect the traditions of his native Portugal.

“If Post-modernism had not claimed the term, and distorted its meaning, Alvaro Siza’s buildings might legitimately have been called by that name. His architecture proceeds directly from Modernist influences that dominated the field from 1920 to 1970,” according to a statement issued by the Pritzker jury.

“His shapes, molded by light, have a deceptive simplicity about them; they are honest. They solve design problems directly. If shade is needed, an overhanging plane is placed to provide it. If a view is desired, a window is made. Stairs, ramps and walls all appear to be foreordained in a Siza building. That simplicity, upon closer examination, however, is revealed as great complexity. There is a subtle mastery underlying what appear to be natural creations,” the statement says.

Siza, who speaks of “transforming” rather “inventing” space, has been widely acclaimed by his peers. But his public recognition has been largely confined to Portugal, only spreading throughout Europe in the last few years. “Not since the late Luis Barragan of Mexico, who was elected laureate in the second year of the prize, have we honored someone whose work has so eluded the international spotlight, but is nonetheless worthy,” says Jay A. Pritzker, president of the Hyatt Foundation, which established the award in 1979.

Siza was educated at the University of Porto. He finished his first buildings--four houses in Matosinhos--in 1954, before completing his studies. He opened his private practice immediately after his graduation and collaborated with Fernando Tavora, his former teacher.

Siza has said that in his early years he thought architecture was an “untouchable,” pure form that had “some sort of virgin whiteness.” But with experience he came to understand that architecture is “a manifestation of life” and that it is “subject to all kinds of uncertainties.”

His projects in Portugal include a varied array of structures: residences, swimming pools, schools, a tourist office, a cotton warehouse and a motel. Among his buildings in other countries are a church in Salemi, Sicily, a housing project in the Hague and a kindergarten in Berlin. Siza’s Meteorological Centre for the Olympic Village in Barcelona is under construction.

Siza is also known as a teacher, having returned to the University of Porto as a professor in 1966-69. He was a visiting professor at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design in 1988. Exhibitions of his work have taken place at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Royal Institute of British architects in London and the College of Architects at Seville, Spain.

Members of the Pritzker jury are J. Carter Brown, director of the National Gallery of Art in Washington; Lord Rothschild, chairman of the board of trustees of the National Gallery of Art in London; Giovanni Agnelli, chairman of Fiat; architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable; architect Ricardo Legorreta and publisher Toshio Nakamura.