Rafael Vinoly Architects

Total Projects from Rafael Vinoly Architects: 5

Concert pianist or architect? Rafael Vinoly could have been either. Like Daniel Libeskind, he is the personification of the much mused-on relation¬ship between architecture and music. A designer of concert halls and the owner of five pianos, he has said there is no relationship between his two disciplines, but then given lectures on the subject. He has also designed an auditorium shaped like a cello and stresses the need to 'hear with your eyes'.

There are many other counterpoints to Vinoly: he is a highly com¬mercial international architect who still takes time to teach at Harvard, Yale and Columbia; and he is the founder of what was the largest practice in South America but also an activist who set up an alternative architecture school following the 1974 military coup in his native Uruguay. Forever on the move, verbally, physically and geographically, he left Montevideo, where he was born in 1944 - to a father who was the artistic director of the Sodre Opera Theatre - and trained at the University of Buenos Aires. His practice built over nine million square feet of architecture before he moved to New York in 1979 to soak up its energy.

Stylistically he is constantly moving too. His pre-New York work, such as the 1978 Color TV Production Center in Buenos Aires, is squarely in the Modernist tradition, while some of his past US work, such as Princeton Stadium (1998), has something of a superficial Postmodern historicism about it. His work exploded onto the world stage with the Tokyo International Forum project (1996) - a vast crystal palace megastructure with a theatrical glazed oval atrium. All of his output has been informed by a nuts-and-bolts high-tech (even if not always expressed formally) and he shares a close working relationship - and New York and London offices - with British engineers Dewhurst McFarlane.

He is now a hugely successful architect with hundreds of millions of dollars worth of work, especially in the US, where he is designing offices, art galleries, laboratories and museums in a variety of idioms. This recent work includes the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts in Philadelphia (2002), a project that defeated both Louis Kahn and Robert Venturi and that is home to his cello-shaped auditorium, treated as a free-standing building beneath another spectacular glazed roof.

In New York, as part of the Think consortium, he missed out (to Libeskind) in the 2002 World Trade Center competition. Vinoly envisaged a cultural space in the sky. An essential part of the New York experience, he argued, is the view of the city from above. He is still managing to build high in his adopted home, however, with his scheme for the Lincoln Center Jazz Rooms, which is expected to open in 2004 halfway up a skyscraper at Columbus Circle. It envisages a vast glazed backdrop for musical starry nights high above the lights of Manhattan. It could also be considered the archetypal Vinoly project if there were any chance of such a thing from such a versatile performer.

When the limelight gets too much he retires to his butterfly-roofed timber-clad home in the Hamptons, Long Island - custom-made for the sound of his Steinway.

website: www.rvapc.com

Featured Projects

	Atlas Building Address: Droevendaalsesteeg 4, 6708 PB Wageningen , ARNHEM - Netherlands Architect: Rafael Vinoly Architects Category: Education



	Charles M. Harper Center Address: S. Woodlawn Ave 5807 , CHICAGO-ILLINOIS - United States Architect: Rafael Vinoly Architects Category: Education



	Curve Theatre Address: Rutland Street 1 , LEICESTER - United Kingdom Architect: Rafael Vinoly Architects Category: Cultural



	East Wing for Cleveland Museum of Art Address: 11150 East Boulevard , CLEVELAND-OHIO - United States Architect: Rafael Vinoly Architects Category: Cultural \| Museums



	Tokyo International Forum Address: 5-1 Marunouchi 3-chome, Chiyoda-ku , TOKYO - Japan Architect: Rafael Vinoly Architects Category: Office \| Cultural