Last week Portuguese architect Alberto Souto de Moura received the Pritzker Prize, which is like the Nobel Prize for architects, at a ceremony in Washington DC attended by Barack and Michelle Obama.  Photographs of his work show a serene, unflustered sensibility.  The buildings use a modern language less dogmatic than those espoused by Le Corbusier and Mies, one of broad, interrupted surfaces that hovers between minimalism and surrealism.

De Moura handles concrete masterfully.  American architects tend to think of reinforced concrete as a rather specialized technology that’s expensive, labor-intensive, and difficult to manipulate.  De Moura works without these reservations, and within a culture with deep masonry traditions.  He’s used the material over and over again during his thirty-five year career and is able to render it in strikingly fluid, fabric-like forms.  This concrete doesn’t seem so concrete.  De Moura’s ouevre, and his Pritzker, serve as a nice rebuttal of the steel frame.  In coming decades, as construction projects in Africa, Asia, the Middle East and South America take a lion’s share of media attention, concrete just might overtake steel and glass as the contemporary architect’s material of choice.