Rafael Viñoly

Located at East 161st Street, on a two-block site near the borough’s Grand Concourse Boulevard, the Bronx County Hall of Justice is home to 47 courtrooms, seven grand jury rooms, and a large jury assembly room for the Supreme and Criminal Court; administrative offices for the Bronx District Attorney; and facilities for the New York Police Department, the Department of Corrections, and the Department of Probation.

The building 20 Fenchurch Street in London won the 2015 Carbuncle Cup for its ugliness.

Two of the skyscrapers designed by Viñoly, the Vdara in Las Vegas and 20 Fenchurch Street in London, have experienced sun reflectivity problems as a result of their concave curved glass exteriors, which act, respectively, as cylindrical and spherical reflectors. In 2010, the Las Vegas Review Journal reported that sunlight reflecting off the Vdara's south-facing tower could make swimmers in the hotel pool uncomfortably warm and had been known to melt plastic cups and shopping bags; employees of the hotel referred to the phenomenon as the "Vdara death ray". In London, sunlight reflecting off 20 Fenchurch Street during the summer of 2013 melted parts on a parked Jaguar and scorched the carpet of a nearby barber shop.

Asked, in a 2008 interview, what his "defining" project was, the architect chose "the Argentina Color Television Center in Buenos Aires. I was in my early thirties and in control of everything. The building process was so unique. We started construction without really knowing what we were doing, and that [teaches] you a great deal." How, the interviewer wondered, "do you start construction without proper working drawings?" "Well, you put the grid on the site and just do it," was Viñoly's reply. "We built the project the way I think all buildings should be made – as a sort of improvisation on a set of working drawings. We just went to the site and said to the contractor: 'Do it from here to there.' We improvised so much, and that is what gave the building its freshness."

The Hall is operatic in its visual drama. Muschamp was rhapsodic: "By day a glittering crystal, at night a glowing lantern, the Forum's Glass Hall joins the ranks of the world's great spaces. Like some lighter-than-air vessel, the hall's shipshape roofing slices through the Tokyo cityscape." Viñoly took up the theme in a 1998 lecture ("The Tokyo International Forum: The Making of Public Space"), observing that "the dramatic lighting of the truss has achieved what we never set out to do: the roof is becoming a horizontal landmark in the city. Landmarks are normally conceived as endless vertical structures up to the sky. In contrast, this hovers over Tokyo. It can be seen from many places and it is quite wonderful."

In designing the large, complex facility, Viñoly had to reconcile the security demands of an urban threat environment transformed, after construction had begun, by the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing and 9/11; the energy-efficiency requirements of a greener architecture; and his desire to create a structure whose public courtyard, in the words of his firm’s website, embraces “neighboring communities with an open and engaging civic plaza.” “We really wanted to render a building that was open, unlike the building next door which was a fortress,” Viñoly told The Architect’s Newspaper (which identified the building in question as “the Brutalist former Criminal Court building”). “This building is exactly the opposite, with openness and access.”

"The point of this building appears to be the classical belief that the human form lies at the root of the idea of beauty," wrote Herbert Muschamp in his May 1, 1994 New York Times column on Viñoly's swooping, soaring P.E. facility for CUNY's Lehman College. The architect "employs no caryatids or Ionic orders to render this ancient concept," Muschamp observed. "Rather, he integrates engineering and esthetics into one impeccably toned physique."

Organized by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government under the auspices of the Union lnternationale des Architectes, the international competition to design the Forum opened in 1989. Applicants had their work cut out for them: bounded on the east by the curving viaduct of the famous "Bullet Train" and on the west by the moat and outer gardens of the Imperial Palace, the awkwardly shaped site defied cookie-cutter solutions. The facility's intended role as a nerve center of cultural life and commercial activity, not to mention a transportation hub—four subway lines and two of the city's busiest train stations, Tokyo Station and Yūrakuchō Station, lie just to the north and south of the site—presented design challenges of their own.

The first phase of a Herculean project whose master plan encompassed an entire block in Manhattan, The College of Criminal Justice was built in an astonishing 24 months on a fast-track schedule. It became an exemplar of the firm’s approach: standing firm on design principles while collaborating with a project’s stakeholders to arrive at ingenious, often highly innovative design solutions such as the central day-lit atrium, which won recognition from the Municipal Art Society and the City Club with two awards 1988 and 1989.

“Despite his success, Viñoly found himself working in an increasingly authoritative and oppressive society,” writes Muchnic. “When he went home one day and discovered that his personal library had been searched and that some of his books in foreign languages had been deemed suspicious, he decided to leave the country.” He landed a position as a visiting professor of architecture at Harvard University School of Design and, in 1979, moved his family to New York. Without a license to practice architecture in the States, he made ends meet by working as a developer and teaching architecture at various universities. “His first break,” according to Muchnic, “was at the City University of New York’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice.”

In 1978, Viñoly and his family relocated to the United States. For a brief period, he served as a guest lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. In 1979, he settled permanently in New York City where, in 1983, he founded the firm Rafael Viñoly Architects PC. His first major project in New York was the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, completed in 1988. In 1989, he won an international competition to design the Tokyo International Forum, which was completed in 1996. His firm's design was one of the finalists in the World Trade Center design competition.

Green-lighted as part of the construction boom in advance of the 1978 World Cup soccer championship, which Argentina had been tapped to host, the 422,200-foot Estadio Malvinas Argentinas, in the province of Mendoza, was designed to hold more than 50,000 spectators in a bowl nestled in a natural depression in the foothills of the Andes. "The stadium's shallow, gently sloping bowl, the profile of the Andes, visible from most of the stands, and the unobtrusive security architecture combine to give the spectator a sense of being cradled within the landscape" (Rafael Viñoly). "Unusually, players and spectators are not separated by the high fence typical of contemporary stadia; instead, the field is protected by a low railing and a wide moat," making for less obstructed sightlines.

Argentina's pledge to substantially upgrade its stadia and broadcast facilities played a key role in its winning bid to host the 1978 World Cup soccer championship. Of MSGSSS's World Cup-related projects (which include the Mendoza stadium and the renovation of the Rosario stadium), the ATC, the first color TV production center in Argentina, shows off—to dramatic effect—Viñoly's willingness to push the boundaries of the reigning modernist style while remaining sensitive to human use, cultural context, and the natural environment. Harmonizing with its parkland setting, the ATC is equal parts television production center and public plaza, a high-tech nerve center amid playgrounds, a reflecting pool, and an artificial stream (both of which act as "a natural heat exchange for the building's extensive ventilation and air-conditioning systems").

“By 1978, the Estudio de Arquitectura had designed 116 buildings and completed more than 50 of them, nearly all in Argentina,” Suzanne Muchnic writes, in her Los Angeles Times profile of Viñoly. Argentina’s hosting of the 1978 FIFA World Cup only two years after a brutal military junta had crushed Argentinian democracy is now regarded as the regime’s attempt to legitimize itself, put a friendly face on its authoritarian rule, and whitewash its human-rights atrocities (such as the “disappearance”—abduction, torture, and, more often than not, murder—of thousands of Argentinians who opposed the junta). The organizing committee that commissioned Viñoly’s design of the Mendoza stadium answered to the military dictatorship.

Commissioned in 1969 and completed in '73, the Rioja Housing Complex (Spanish: Conjunto Rioja) was developed by the Bank of the City of Buenos Aires as subsidized housing for 440 employee families. A mixed-use, high-density city within a city occupying 41,000 square meters (456,000 square feet), it incorporates commercial real estate, community spaces, and private residences in seven 18-story units clustered together and linked by 10 bridges to facilitate easy circulation. The design, as the authors of the monograph Rafael Viñoly point out, "combines high density with a layout meant to foster a strong sense of community. An open site allowing pedestrian traffic through most of its footprint creates a large public realm, while the presence of solaria, decks, shops, gardens, and other services throughout the project's multi-level internal circulation scheme encourages interaction among its inhabitants."

Designed in 1968 and completed in '74, the Buenos Aires headquarters of the Argentine Industrial Union (Spanish: Unión Industrial Argentina or UIA), the country's leading advocacy group for industrial manufacturers, helped establish Viñoly as a young architect to watch. According to the monograph Rafael Viñoly, El Edificio Carlos Pellegrini ("the Carlos Pellegrini Building") marks the architect's "first success in a national design competition." By day, the entry notes, the building's "glass curtain wall...provides staff and visitors spectacular views of the city and the port; at night, it becomes highly transparent, offering equally dramatic views in the opposite direction by revealing the spaces and activities within." The "120-meter-tall pure glass prism" (Rafael Viñoly), which served as UIA's headquarters until 2001, is now regarded as a distinguishing feature of the city's skyline.

To commemorate its 90th anniversary (more accurately, the anniversary of the bank's nationalization and transferral, in 1888, to the city), the Banco Ciudad de Buenos Aires commissioned a new, more modern headquarters from MSGSSS. Built at breakneck speed by 1000 workers spread over three daily shifts in order to be ready for the building's planned opening in 1968, the project was completed in just six months. Inaugurated on May 23, 1968, the main office of the Banco Ciudad de Buenos Aires employed a traffic-stoppingly innovative design: the extensive use of glass bricks (a modernist trademark) and a glazed panel that gave on pedestrian traffic, signifying institutional transparency as well as accessibility to all Argentinians, regardless of socioeconomic class. The building "quickly gained international recognition," writes R. Stephen Sennott, in the Encyclopedia of Twentieth Century Architecture, "for its transparent use of light and color and for its strong volumetric articulation."

In 1964, he formed the "Estudio de Arquitectura Manteola-Petchersky-Sánchez Gómez-Santos-Solsona-Viñoly" architectural firm in Buenos Aires with six associates (Flora Manteola, Ignacio Petchersky, Javier Sánchez Gómez, Josefina Santos, and Justo Solsona). This practice, which came to be known as M/SG/S/S/S, or MSGSSS, would go on to become one of the largest architectural practices in South America, completing many significant commissions in a very short time.

Rafael Viñoly Beceiro (born 1944) is a Uruguayan architect. He is the principal of Rafael Viñoly Architects, which he founded in 1983. The firm has offices in New York City, Palo Alto, London, Manchester, Abu Dhabi, and Buenos Aires.

Viñoly was born in Montevideo, Uruguay, in 1944, to Román Viñoly Barreto, a film and theater director, and Maria Beceiro, a math teacher. He attended the University of Buenos Aires, receiving a Diploma in Architecture (1968) and a Master of Architecture (1969) from the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism.

As the monograph Rafael Viñoly notes, he had to serve two masters: “the college’s need for a new and bigger building and the legal mandate to preserve a designated landmark, the Flemish Baroque exterior” of Haaren Hall, formerly the 1906 DeWitt Clinton High School, designed by Charles B. J. Snyder. “The new construction, both within and beyond the previous building envelope, acknowledges the rhythms and proportions of the original façade while effecting a transition” to Viñoly’s “modern architectural vocabulary… The renovation inserted a sky-lit interior plaza within the high school’s cast-iron columns and load-bearing masonry walls; around its perimeter is the college library, which includes one of the largest criminal justice collections in the United States.”