The Spanish architects’ office Nieto Sobejano has been awarded the 2015 Alvar Aalto Medal. The office and its founding architects, Fuensanta Nieto and Enrique Sobejano, received special praise for their in-depth understanding of local culture and the contexts of their design briefs.
Creative collaborators since the early 1980s, Nieto and Sobejano are renowned for the great variety of their portfolio, although their best-known works are galleries and museums. Employing a team of forty, Nieto Sobejano Architects has offices based in Madrid and Berlin. The duo has received abundant professional recognition, including the prestigious Aga Khan Award for Architecture. Their work has also been exhibited at the Venice Biennale and at MoMa in New York. Both architects divide their time between creative assignments and lecturing at European University of Madrid and the Berlin University of the Arts (UdK).
The jury statement said.- “Nieto and Sobejano were key names in the new wave of Spanish architecture, which emerged in the late 1970s. The roots of their architecture lie in Spain, and its multi-layered history and culture. Their works speak a silent language, proving that the precondition of meaningful architecture is an in-depth understanding of local culture and the context of the design brief.”
The members of the 2015 jury were the architects Rainer Mahlamäki (Finland), Simo Freese (Finland), Wessel de Jonge (the Netherlands) and Dorte Mandrup-Poulsen (Denmark). The Alvar Aalto Medal, presented every three years, is awarded to an architect or architects’ office with outstanding merit in creative architecture. The medal is awarded for a career, not for one particular building or project. The medal was awarded for the first time in 1967, and the recipient was Alvar Aalto.
The bronze medal was designed by Alvar Aalto. The amphitheatre shape, which forms the basis for the relief figure on the medal, is a recurrent motif in Aalto’s architecture.
The medal committee includes representatives from the Alvar Aalto Foundation, the Finnish Museum of Architecture, the city of Helsinki, the Finnish Society of Architecture, and the Finnish Association of Architects, SAFA.
Alvar Aalto Medal recipients:
- 1967 Alvar Aalto
- 1973 Hakon Ahlberg (Sweden)
- 1978 James Stirling (England)
- 1982 Jørn Utzon (Denmark)
- 1985 Tadao Ando (Japan)
- 1988 Álvaro Siza (Portugal)
- 1992 Glenn Murcutt (Australia)
- 1998 Steven Holl (USA)
- 2003 Rogelio Salmona (Colombia)
- 2009 Tegnestuen Vandkunsten (Denmark)
- 2012 Paulo David (Portugal)
- 2015 Nieto Sobejano (Spain)
