Contact: Janet Mendelsohn
617-283-2373
email: jmendelsohn@wellesley.edu
Peter Walsh
Davs Museum and Cultural Center
617-283-2034
Web site: http://new.wellesley.edu/DavisMuseum/davismenu.html
May 1, 1996
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Rafael Moneo, architect of Wellesley College's Davis Museum and Cultural Center, has won the Pritzker Architecture Prize for 1996. Conferred annually since 1979 by the Hyatt Foundation, the Pritzker Prize has been described by The New York Times as architecture's highest honor. Moneo, who lives in Madrid and is the only Spaniard to receive the prize, which carries a $100,000 award, will be presented with the Pritzker on June 12 at the Getty Center in Los Angeles.
Opened in 1993, Wellesley's Davis Museum and Cultural Center is Moneo's only completed project in the United States. It was named for the museum's chief donors, Kathryn Wasserman Davis (Wellesley College Class of 1928) and her late husband, Shelby Cullom Davis. Susan Taylor, director of the Davis Museum since 1986, served as project director for the building. A search committee, co-chaired by Taylor and advised by two former deans of the School of Architecture at MIT, chose Moneo from a field of more than 180 architects to design the Davis.
"This is architecture in the service of art but with a strong and conspicuous architectural presence," wrote The New York Times's architecture critic Paul Goldberger in 1993. "It is Mr. Moneo's great gift here to show us that these two things, a potent architectural presence and a deference to the demands of the display of art, do not have to be contradictory."
Boston Globe architecture critic Robert Campbell has described Rafael Moneo as "long regarded by his peers as one of the best architects in the world. He's deeply intellectual but disagrees with architects who spend their time theorizing. He thinks architecture only matters when it actually gets built, and he's extremely respectful of history and local context."
The Davis Museum houses some 5,000 works of art from all over the world, including major pieces by Claude Monet, Paul Cezanne, Andy Warhol, and Louise Nevelson. Its distinguished and innovative programs of special exhibitions, including Margarett Sargent: A Modern Temperament (on view through July 7) have been hailed by critics at The Boston Globe, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal, among many other publications. The Davis Museum has been visited by architects and architectural students from around the world. It is open to the public, free of charge, daily except Monday.
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