The Brazilian brutalist Paulo Mendes da Rocha, an architect regarded for his big concrete paperwork and bold structural acrobatics, has gained RIBA’s prestigious royal gold medal for 2017.

A parent some distance eliminated from the same old forged of international “starchitects”, the 87 12 months vintage has spent the beyond six a long time constructing a frame of paintings, ordinarily in his domestic country, that sticks out for its pressure of expression and formidable structural power, married with finely crafted detail.

“His paintings has a braveness and readability few can match,” stated architect Neil Gillespie, who nominated Mendes da Rocha for the accolade. “His systems are bold and joyous, his use of concrete formidable and innovative. There is a exceptional that renders it timeless.”

Mendes da Rocha’s homes have an archaic, nearly primal air, with big fins of concrete owning a raw, visceral roughness. He shot to prominence on the age of 30 together along with his layout for the Paulistano Athletic Club in São Paulo, which includes six concrete blades assisting a skinny round concrete roof supported with the aid of using 12 slim cables. Built in 1958, it turned into a startling sight – a wonderful circus balancing act that driven the boundaries of what turned into bodily possible.

His Brazilian pavilion for the Expo 70 in Osaka turned into similarly experimental, postponing a large concrete area body withinside the air, balanced at the floor at a unmarried point. As architect John McAslan, who seconded the nomination, positioned it: “His engineering intelligence has continually equalled his formal originality.” It turned into an outlook he discovered from his father, who turned into an engineer and clothier of hydraulic works and port facilities. Mendes da Rocha has stated his father taught him to respect “technique”, deriving his paperwork from coherent structural ideas.

That equal originality may be visible in his Brazilian public homes withinside the Seventies and 80s – from the Estádio Serra Dourada and the Museum of Contemporary Art on the University of São Paulo in 1975, to the Saint Peter Chapel in 1987 and the broadly celebrated Pinacoteca do Estado gallery (1993), winner of the Mies van der Rohe award.

Last 12 months he finished the long-awaited Lisbon Coach Museum, which stands as a gargantuan concrete hangar close to Belém. It is one in every of his few works outdoor Brazil.

This has been a bumper 12 months of gongs for Mendes da Rocha, selecting up Japan’s prestigious Praemium Imperiale award in addition to Venice Biennale Golden Lion for lifetime achievement. The Venice jurors praised his “awesome consistency” and “structural genius”.

But his haul of medals – he additionally gained the Pritzker prize in 2006 – is not likely to alternate his down-to-earth approach. “Unlike many those who are fearful of poverty,” he wrote in 2003, “I actually have continually been interested in it, to easy things, with out understanding why. Not hardship, however the humility of easy things. I assume the whole lot superfluous is irritating. Everything that isn’t important turns into grotesque, mainly in our time.”