🇵🇹 Eduardo Souto de Moura

Eduardo Souto de Moura was born on 25 July 1952 in Porto, Portugal. He enrolled at the Porto Higher Institute of Fine Arts intending to study sculpture, but a chance encounter with the writings of the American minimalist artist Donald Judd, and Judd's thinking about the communal nature of building, turned him toward architecture instead.

His training came as much from practice as from school. As a young man he worked briefly with the architect Noé Dinis, and then, crucially, spent five years from 1975 to 1979 in the office of Álvaro Siza, the architect who had already become the leading figure of Portuguese modernism. Siza's influence on Souto de Moura was profound and lifelong, and the two would remain colleagues, collaborators, and friends. After receiving his architecture degree in 1980, Souto de Moura opened his own practice in Porto.

Like Siza, he belonged to the orbit of the Porto School, with its insistence that architecture answer to its site, its climate, and its materials. But Souto de Moura developed a voice of his own: more openly drawn to the raw expression of structure, to stone and steel and exposed concrete, and to a stripped, almost severe geometry. His early houses in northern Portugal, often long, low, and built into their terrain, showed an architect thinking hard about walls, weight, and the edge between building and ground.

His best-known work is the Braga Municipal Stadium, completed in 2003. Set into a former granite quarry, it dispenses with the conventional bowl: two long stands face each other, the ends left open to the rock face on one side and the landscape on the other, the stands linked by cables overhead. The granite excavated from the site was crushed and used in the building's own concrete. It is a structure that reads as both a feat of engineering and a part of the terrain.

Other major projects span his career: the conversion of the Santa Maria do Bouro monastery into a state-run inn, or pousada, where he inserted a modern hotel into a ruined Cistercian monastery without erasing its history; the Burgo Tower and the stations of the Porto metro; the Casa das Histórias Paula Rego in Cascais, a museum for the painter Paula Rego marked by two distinctive pyramidal towers; and buildings in Spain, Italy, Germany, Switzerland, and Britain. He has completed well over sixty buildings, most of them in Portugal.

In March 2011 the Pritzker Architecture Prize was awarded to Eduardo Souto de Moura, making him the second Portuguese architect to receive it, after Siza. The jury praised buildings that could hold seemingly contradictory qualities together, power and modesty, bravado and subtlety, bold public presence and a sense of intimacy, all at once.

If Siza's signature is the white wall and the flowing interior, Souto de Moura's is the precise line where a building meets the earth. He is drawn to ruins, to walls that already exist, to the question of what to keep and what to add, and many of his finest works are acts of transformation rather than creation from nothing, a monastery becoming an inn, a quarry becoming a stadium, an old market becoming a cultural centre. He treats the existing world as a collaborator.

Souto de Moura is known for an architecture of careful restraint and exacting detail, and for a dry, self-deprecating wit about the profession; he has spoken of architecture's beginnings, in his own case, as something almost accidental, the result of a chance encounter rather than a childhood calling. He continues to teach and to build, and to work alongside Siza, the two of them collaborating on projects into the present day, a rare case of master and former apprentice who became lasting peers.

His standing now is that of a modern master: a builder who treats stone and concrete as honest, expressive materials, who sets his buildings into the land with a geologist's eye, and who, with Siza, has made the city of Porto one of the unlikely capitals of contemporary world architecture. Two Pritzker laureates from the same small city, the same school, and the same studio is a concentration of talent that few places on earth can match, and Souto de Moura is central to that story.