Rafael Viñoly (1944 – 2023)

FAIA JIA SCA IntFRIBA
Founder, Rafael Viñoly Architects

Rafael Viñoly has been hailed as “the extraordinary Uruguay-born architect whose function-driven, context-inspired buildings made their marks on six continents” (Architectural Digest). In over a half-century of built work, he realized over 600 commissions across most building typologies in the Americas, Europe, Africa, Asia, and Oceania. His enormous body of built work is characterized by the holistic attention to proportion and a sustained structural originality that transcended passing architectural fads.

He laid out his conception of the architectural profession in this text from 1995, which has since been a touchstone for the firm.

“To create the synthesis that is a successful building, the architect needs to be in charge of the complexity of all the technical and cultural aspects of a project. The capacity to lead that process is what requires the special kind of creativity which is unique to the field.

Architecture is not simply an artistic endeavor, or a mere technical or organizational challenge, it is a social practice with a significant impact on the collective environment well beyond the effects of its initial viewing. It is that responsibility towards the environment that defines the realm of competence of the profession.

Each project is unique in and of itself because the forces that make it happen are always specific to it: client, site, financial constraints, technological environment, cultural aspirations, etc. It should be self-evident then that, if properly considered, those conditions should produce a unique result, unprecedented by nature, and therefore unencumbered by stylistic agendas.

The authorship value that presupposes a recognizable aesthetic in a body of work should be found, in ours, in the consistency with which each project responds to those conditions, rather than in the mere repetition of some visual cues.

We also believe that the advancement of Architecture as a discipline has always been the result of two factors: technological innovation and the challenging of the conventional character of the brief. Both of those goals are at the center of our work. The first because the engineering of a form is an essential part of its conceptualization, and the second, because the brief always represents a reductive view of how things have been, as opposed to how things could be. This is the reason why the dialogue with the client is crucial to the level of intellectual value of the design process.

As a result, for us, architectural design is a particular form of “translation” in which the story is written as its translation is made.”