Being Modern With an Eye on History

Spanish architect Jose Rafael Moneo has created banks, an airport terminal, museums and apartment buildings. As he takes on his latest project--the new St. Vibiana’s Cathedral--critics cite his gift for capturing history within a contemporary design.

And the best example of that may be the National Museum of Roman Art in Merida, Spain, built over the site of archeological excavations. With its many dramatic archways of brick, the 1986 museum “lifts your spirit as you go into this extraordinary space,” according to J. Carter Brown, director emeritus of the National Gallery of Art in Washington.

Brown was also chairman of the jury that awarded Moneo this year’s Pritzker Architecture Prize, a $100,000 award compared to the Nobel Prize. Moneo formally received the Pritzker on Wednesday night at a lavish ceremony and dinner at the construction site of the Getty Center in Brentwood. The event became a celebration of Tuesday’s announcement that Moneo will be the designer of the new cathedral for the Los Angeles Roman Catholic archdiocese.

Moneo’s only completed structure in the United States is the Davis Museum and Cultural Center at Wellesley College in Wellesley, Mass., built in 1993. Topped with five skylights, the brick museum helps create a plaza that reminds some visitors of a medieval hill town in Spain or Italy.

Another work cited by the Pritzker jury is Moneo’s San Pablo Airport terminal in Seville, Spain, completed in 1991. Its rounded ceiling vaults are meant to act as a modern “threshold to the sky” and yet have some flavor of Spanish antiquity.

The Pilar and Joan Miro Foundation gallery and offices in Palma on the Spanish island of Majorca have more of a contemporary feel. Completed in 1992, the hillside complex includes huge concrete window louvers, a garden plaza (which the Los Angeles archdiocese also wants) and a reflecting pool on a gallery roof.

In his Pritzker acceptance speech Wednesday, Moneo spoke of his love of architecture and called for a return to beauty in design, away from trendiness for its own sake. “So many architects now seek to manifest motion instead of stability, the ephemeral instead of the perpetual, the fragmented instead of the whole and the fictitious instead of the real,” the 59-year-old Madrid resident said.

Among the 350 guests attending the black-tie affair were Gov. Pete Wilson, Cardinal Roger M. Mahony, Spanish Consul Victor Ibanez-Martin and Jay Pritzker, president of the Hyatt Foundation, which established the award in 1979. Also attending were such previous Pritzker laureates as Frank O. Gehry, who was a finalist in the St. Vibiana’s competition, and Richard Meier, who designed the large new Getty campus.