Teodoro Gonzalez De Leon will receive the 2008 UIA Gold medal

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

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