Juan Miguel Hernández León, Spanish architect and president of the Círculo de Bellas Artes, awarded Álvaro Siza and Eduardo Souto de Moura, both alumni of Porto’s Superior School of Fine Arts (ESBAP), with the 1998 and 2023 Gold Medals.

The affinity between Siza and Souto de Moura, almost twenty years younger, is defined not by the school but through it, thanks to the post-revolutionary initiatives of the Local Ambulatory Support Service (SAAL). Eduardo Souto de Moura would collaborate in Álvaro Siza's office between 1974 and 1979, having since developed his own body of work, one recognized with the 2011 Pritzker Prize, almost twenty years after Siza.

Siza’s first major museum was the unbuilt La Defensa Cultural Centre (1988-90). He owes this in part to Hernández León, then General Director of Fine Arts at the Ministry of Culture, with whom he would develop Madrid’s Master Plan (2002-19) as a kind of urban foyer for the Prado, the Thyssen-Bornemisza and the Reina Sofía museums. This notion of ​​museological extension or interrelation is also evident in the co-authorships that Siza has created with Souto de Moura, from the competition for Helsinki’s Museum of Contemporary Art (1992-93) to Santo Tirso’s International Contemporary Sculpture Museum (2010-15).

Moderated by architect António Choupina, this will be one of the last moments of the Naked Architecture program taking place in the Álvaro Siza Wing, before the opening of the Collection's exhibitions.