Rafael Viñoly, a Uruguayan-born architect whose New York-based firm was responsible for the construction of major cultural and commercial buildings in nearly a dozen countries, died on Thursday. in Manhattan. He was 78.
According to his son, Roman, the company’s director, his death at a hospital was due to an aneurysm.
Mr. Viñoly is not known for a particular style, but he has a penchant for enclosing large spaces under glass, creating vibrant courtyards.
In New York, he’s probably best known for 432 Park Avenue, a nearly 1,400-foot apartment tower that was briefly the tallest residential building in the world. Its mesh exterior has been praised by critics for its restrained elegance.
But residents, some of whom have paid tens of millions of dollars for their apartments, have complained of engineering and construction problems, which have resulted in creaking, bumping and clicking and trash chutes. sounds like a bomb,” said one. garbage down. The swaying building left one resident trapped in the elevator for more than an hour. The issues prompted a flurry of reports, including a on the front page of The New York Timeson the journey of owning such super-luxury properties.
Mr. Viñoly was once a 24-7 architecture enthusiast and vivacious man who hired a chef who had studied at the Cordon Bleu. He wears multiple pairs of black-rimmed glasses around his neck to always have one that suits him, and he is ready to sketch out the most intricate architectural details.
He is also a trained pianist who has performed solo in a music pavilion on his campus in Water Mill, NY, on Eastern Long Island. In 2011, he told The Times that he owns nine pianos, including one that he helped developwith a curved keyboard that gives you easy access to the highest and lowest notes.
Architect David Rockwell, who has worked with Mr. Viñoly on a number of projects, said: “Not many people think the piano needs to be reinvented. “He’s very curious.”
After the World Trade Center tower was demolished in 2001, Mr. Viñoly and the architect Frederic Schwartz helped found the Think Group, which took an innovative approach to recreating 16 acres of land to zero. Its main proposal was to construct a pair of new twin towers in the form of skeletons, massive carved structures into which cultural buildings would be incorporated over time.
The proposal was the first choice of the committee convened to choose a plan to rebuild the World Trade Center, but its decision was overturned by Governor George E. Pataki, who chose a plan to rebuild the World Trade Center. Daniel Libeskind’s plan.
In New York, Mr. Viñoly was responsible for Jazz’s monumental home at Lincoln Center, overlooking the Columbus Roundabout, and the conversion of a historic high school into the John Jay College of Criminal Justice campus.
His other projects in the United States include a football stadium at Princeton University. In Philadelphia, he Kimmel . Performing Arts Center place several auditoriums under a large glass dome. He designed a major extension to the Cleveland Museum of Art and convention centers in Pittsburgh and Boston.
my building for Booth Business School at the University of Chicago includes a giant glass atrium and a roof that almost touches the ground, opposite Frank Lloyd Wright’s low-key Frederick C. Robie House.
His most famous building is the Tokyo International Forum, a convention center that partly resembles an upside-down ship under glass. When it opened in 1997, Herbert Muschampslater the architectural critic of The Times, called it “qualities that are lucid, comprehensive, and utterly simple, qualities that have not been widely favored in architecture in a time.”
Rafael Vinoly was born in Montevideo on June 1, 1944, to Roman Viñoly Barreto, a film and theater director, and Maria Beceiro, a math teacher. He studied architecture at University of Buenos Aires, but even before he graduated, he founded what has become one of Argentina’s largest architecture firms. In 1978, he received a teaching position at Harvard and moved his family to the United States.
The following year they settled in New York, where he founded Architect Rafael Viñoly in 1983.
In addition to his son, survivors include Viñoly’s wife, Diana, an interior designer; his stepchildren are Nicolas and Lucas Michael; one niece and three stepsisters.
A full obituary will follow.
