Álvaro 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 in February 2009 at a black-tie ceremony in the RIBA’s Florence Hall. The official citation reads: “Álvaro 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 Álvaro 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 […]”. RIBA also announced the award of 14 honorary fellowships for 2009, to people who have made outstanding contributions to architecture: - Peter Ackroyd (writer) | - Richard Sennett (writer) | - Stephen Bayley (critic) | - Loren Butt (engineer) | - David Fisk (engineer) | - Duncan Michael (engineer) | - Michael Ingall (developer) | - James Turrell (artist) | - Madelon Vriesendorp (artist) | - Laura Lee (client) | - Jonathon Porritt (sustainability campaigner) | - Allain Provost (landscape architect) | - Doreen Lawrence (director of the Stephen Lawrence Trust) | - Andrew Scoones (director of the Building Centre Trust) | The award is for a body of work, rather than for one building or for an architect who is currently fashionable. Previous winners include Le Corbusier (1953), Frank Gehry (2000), Archigram (2002), Frei Otto (2005), Toyo Ito |(2006), Herzog and de Meuron |(2007) and Edward Cullinan| (2008). Info su www.architecture.com