2008 UIA Gold Medal awarded to Teodoro González de León

The jury decided to award the 2008 Gold medal to the Mexican architect Teodoro González de León. He will receive the medal at a ceremony in Turin, on 2 July 2008, during the twenty third UIA Congress.

CITATION
Through this medal, the UIA honours and highlights a lifetime of work devoted to the realisation of an architecture that reflects an era, its social reality, its culture and its traditions.

Teodoro González de León: Torres Arcos Bosques, Mexico City, 2008

The work of Teodoro González de León is part of the architecture of the Modern Movement, with a vocabulary that is constantly renewed enriched and reinterpreted.

Teodoro González de León: Mexican Embassy in Berlin, 1999

His architecture is monumental, in the positive sense of the word and the intelligent use he makes of materials, of light and different textures confer on his realisations a particular presence, imposing in the urban as well as in the natural context.

JURY
The jury for the 2008 Gold Medal met in Bratislava, on 16 and 17 April 2008. Under the presidency of Gaëtan Siew, UIA President, it was composed as follows: Jordi Farrando (Spain), UIA Secretary General, Donald J. Hackl (USA), UIA Treasurer, Louise Cox (Australia), 1st UIA Vice-President, Martin Drahovsky (Slovakia), 2nd Vice-Président, Giancarlo Ius (Italy), Mauricio Rivero Borrell (Mexico), Seif Alnaga (Egypt), UIA Vice- Presidents, Wolf Tochtermann (Germany), Director of the UIA International Competitions Commission.

BIOGRAPHY
Teodoro González de León was born in 1926 in Mexico and studied there at the National School of Architecture from 1942 to 1947. He was granted a scholarship by the French government and worked in the Le Corbusier Atelier between 1947 and 1949, notably on the St Dié factory project. He returned to practice in Mexico in 1950.

His works represent a wide variety of programmes: public buildings, housing and residences, urban spaces, parks and gardens. His most famous works of the 1970-1980 period are the Mexican embassy in Brazilia, the Mexico College and the INFONAVIT building with Abraham Zabludovsky, then the Tomás Garrido Canabal Park in Villahermosa, Tabasco, in1986 , with Francisco Serrano and Aurelio Nuño, and, more recently, the archaeological museum on the Tajin site in Veracruz (1992), the Superior School of Music in Mexico (1994) and the Mexican Embassy in Berlin, in 1999, with Francisco Serrano.

UIA GOLD MEDAL
When creating this medal in 1984, the aim of the UIA was to bestow it with a prestige equivalent to that held by the Nobel Prize in the fields of Arts, Sciences and Social Sciences. This unique international distinction, free of any interests, national or private, is the supreme honour an architect can receive from his/her peers. It is awarded to a living architect, in recognition of his/her achievements and contributions made throughout his/her life and career, to the benefit of man and society, and the promotion of the art of architecture.

Since its creation, the UIA Gold Medal has been awarded to:
* Hassan Fathy (Egypt), in 1984
* Reima Pietila (Finland), in 1987
* Charles Correa (India), in 1990
* Fumihiko Maki (Japan), in 1993
* Rafael Moneo (Spain), in 1996
* Ricardo Legorreta Vilchis (Mexico), in 1999
* Renzo Piano (Italy), in 2002
* Tadao Ando (Japan) in 2005