We celebrate Rafael Moneo’s 88 years with a tour of the trajectory of an exceptional architect
Listening to Rafael Moneo In the multiple interviews he has granted, one has the feeling that the architect is a demanding conversationalist who requires centered minds. Moneo speaks with messy phrases, rarely the subject appears at the beginning, comes and comes. But be careful, he chooses words very well, he is not a man of grandiloquences and topics. Precision is everything, Also in the word.
Rafel Moneo.Fernando Camino/Getty Images
What seems to happen to the architect is that Delibera while talking, takes the time to shape what it means. For Moneo, the notion of slowness is important. Maybe that’s why he relies both in the drawing by hand and took to incorporate computers into his architecture study. Until he was required to deliver the Potsdamer Platz de Berlin project in computer at the beginning of the nineties and not everything drawn as he intended. According to the architect, Forming the building by hand helps you think about it in a way that you do not do it otherwise.
Faced with what could be thought of, This idea of deliberation and slowness has made the Pritzker prize very prolific throughout his career. Not only has it built some of the most significant buildings in Spain, Europe or the United States, but has also dedicated much of its life to teaching.
Rafael Moneo in his study in Rome in 1963. For the architect, his stay in the Italian city was definitive since it was there that he forged the vision of the architecture that has accompanied him throughout his career: the architecture does not end with the building and it is necessary when designing to keep in mind both the history of the city and its imminent future.
It all started in Rome
For Moneo, the two years he spent in Rome, “the city for Antonomasia”, at the beginning of his career were absolutely defining. There he drew his way of understanding architecture: as something indissoluble from the city. For Moneo, the architecture does not end where the building ends, the buildings are not isolated entities but must belong to the city and help it evolve. “Sometimes, the city can feel rough but I think it is the natural environment of humans because it offers the best that life in common can giveI perceive it as a meeting place. Discovering and exploring what sense makes the continuity of the city seem to me one of the most urgent tasks for the architect, ”he says.
Moneo conceives the building from the vision of what he needs to be more than as he wants to be, which takes him away from the ego of architect attributed to some of his colleagues.
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