Prince of Asturias Awards 1981–2014. Speeches

P rince of A sturias A wards 1981-2014. S peeches 5 There was a time when building did not require the presence of an architect. The architect’s trade had not yet made its appearance. Building was yet another activity among the many needed to survive. However, the necessary specialisation that accompanied the evolution of the human species soon gave way to concrete tasks related to building that culminated in the appearance of the architect. It may well be the memory of that very remote past which is behind the instinct to build that still thrives within us today. The popular expression “there is an architect inside every one of us” would seem to confirm this. Along with this innate attraction for building, there is, in the use we make of the term today, an understanding of what this profession forged in the Renaissance actually is: the architect as someone who, with a mastery of drawing, which the Italians then called disegno , was able to shape what was built. The Italian term later moved on to the English term design and the Spanish term diseño , with the assumption that the practitioner masters both the technical knowledge and the ability to give expression to the aesthetic zeitgeist of a particular moment in time. Today the role of the architect as a technical expert seems to have lost ground, while the artistic component that has always accompanied our trade prevails over its technological counterpart. The architect, as the person responsible only for the image, the appearance that buildings offer us. This is the situation we now find ourselves in. I would like architects —and by saying architects, I am thinking of those to come— to continue to keep alive that necessary rationality that survival requires, without forgetting howmuch mortals imbue what they build with their conception of the world. I would like architects to continue to be involved in the process of building, knowing and understanding the formal and structural aspects that determine what buildings are. I would like architects to make the construction of the city the rationale underlying their profession. A city that makes our work transcend the strictly personal, since within this work what is public inevitably intersects with what is private. Rafael Moneo — Prince of Asturias Award for the Arts 2012 Excerpt from the speech given on the occasion of receiving the Prince of Asturias Award for the Arts on 26/10/2012.