US President Barack Obama praised the winner of a top architecture prize for embodying a style that is, in Mr Obama’s words, as “effortless as it is beautiful”.

Mr Obama lauded Eduardo Souto de Moura of Portugal at an awards ceremony where Mr de Moura was receiving the 2011 Pritzker Architecture Prize.

The esteemed prize often is referred to as the Nobel Prize for architecture. Mr De Moura has won acclaim for his careful use of natural materials and unexpected dashes of colour. He has designed homes, hotels, museums, sports facilities and other structures, mainly in his native country but also elsewhere in Europe.

“His simple shapes and clean lines always fit seamlessly into the surroundings,” Mr Obama said. The award dates from 1979 and is financed by Chicago’s Pritzker family, which founded the Hyatt hotel chain.

Mr Obama has close ties to family heiress Penny Pritzker, who was his 2008 campaign finance chairman, helping Obama set a record for presidential fundraising.

Ms Pritzker is also a member of a jobs and competitiveness council that advises Mr Obama.

The president confessed to once harbouring dreams of becoming an architect.

“I expected to be more creative than I turned out, so I turned to politics instead,” he told the black-tie crowd at the majestic Andrew W. Mellon Auditorium in Washington, itself considered an architectural work of art.

Among the De Moura projects cited by Pritzker jurors was a sports stadium he designed into a mountainside in Braga, Portugal, where the European soccer championship was held in 2004.

Mr Obama noted that the stadium is situated in such a way to give a vantage point to fans who cannot afford to buy a ticket, “kind of like Portugal’s version of Wrigley Field”, a venerable Chicago baseball stadium.