Santiago Calatrava won the Prince of Asturias Award for the Arts in 1999. The Spanish architect, structural engineer and sculptor received the honour in recognition of a body of work that crossed artistic and technical boundaries.
Calatrava was born in Valencia in 1951 and trained in fine arts, architecture and civil engineering. His projects often combine expressive sculptural forms with demanding structural systems, especially bridges, railway stations, towers and cultural buildings.
By 1999, his major works included the Alamillo Bridge in Seville, the Montjuïc Communications Tower in Barcelona and the Lyon-Satolas high-speed railway station in France. He had also exhibited drawings, sculptures and architectural models, making the arts category particularly relevant to his multidisciplinary career.
The award’s name was later changed from the Prince of Asturias Awards to the Princess of Asturias Awards. That later naming change does not alter the historical answer: the 1999 arts laureate was Calatrava. He was the third architect to receive the prize in its first decades, after Oscar Niemeyer and Francisco Javier Sáenz de Oiza.