Alvaro Siza has been announced as the RIBA's 2009 Royal Gold Medallist.
The medal will be presented at the Royal Gold Medal and Fellowships Dinner on 26 February 2009 at a black-tie ceremony in the RIBA's Florence Hall.
"Alvaro Siza is simply a profoundly complete architect who defies categorisation.
The forging of a masterful and seemingly inevitable architecture out of the possibilities of a site is one of the supreme characteristics of Alvaro Siza's architecture.
He manipulates his readings of place into sculptural forms that are never predictable or ordinary, yet are never allowed to dominate over use or typological intelligibility.
In Siza's buildings, perhaps like no others, it is the relationships between the elements of the architecture that is given primacy rather than the shape or texture of the elements themselves.
This is an architecture in which an economy of expressive means is combined with an abundance of spatial revelation."