Moneo has spent a long career refusing to be a stylist, and the refusal is the point: he has written that a building’s form should be argued from its site and its programme rather than from an authorial signature, and his own work moves from the rationalist Bankinter tower to the Roman brick of Mérida to the alabaster and stone of Los Angeles without a recognisable manner holding it together. He worked for Jørn Utzon in Denmark, taught at Madrid, Barcelona and Harvard, where he chaired the design school, and built the Atocha station hall, the Kursaal at San Sebastián, the extension to the Prado and the Stockholm Museum of Modern Art. He is the only Spaniard to have received the Pritzker, the RIBA Royal Gold Medal and the Praemium Imperiale.
