The prestigious Portuguese architect was born in Matosinhos in 1933. After forty years of the start of Álvaro Siza Vieira’s career, his works continue to be drawn by the hands of contemporaneity and are the subject of enormous interest worldwide, even more so after his work having been awarded a Pritzker Prize, the most important distinction worldwide in the area of architecture in 1992. The Library of the University of Aveiro (UA), the Boa Nova Tea House (Leça da Palmeira), the Museum of Contemporary Art of Galicia (Santiago de Compostela), the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Porto, the Meteorological Centre of the Olympic Village of Barcelona, the Museum of Contemporary Art of Serralves (Porto), the Church of Marco de Canaveses, the Portugal Pavilion at Expo 98 and the UA Library, for whose campus he also designed the water tank built in 1991, earned him awards from all over the world. Besides the Pritzker Prize, there are others worth mentioning, such as the Gold Medal for Architecture from the College of Architects of Madrid (1980), the Medal of the Alvar Aalto Foundation (1980), the European Prize for Architecture, of the EC Commission/Mies van der Rohe Foundation (1980), the Architecture of the Year Prize (1982), awarded by the Portuguese Section of the International Association of Art Critics, and the Architecture Prize of the Association of Portuguese Architects (1987). In 1993 he received the National Prize for Architecture and, in 1996 and 2000 he won the Secil Prize for Architecture. In 2001 he was distinguished by the Wolf Foundation with the Alexandre Herculano National Prize for Architecture. The Gold Medal of the Royal Institute of British Architects, awarded in 2009, is one of the most recent awards attributed to Álvaro Siza Vieira, to be added to a very long list of distinctions that also includes several honorary doctorates from universities around the world.
