“Architecture is the ongoing dialogue between forces of life” (Rafael Viñoly). An almost banal sentence that well reflects many works of one of the leading architects in the world today. An architect whose building style is noted for its deliberate lack of a personal style, advocating instead a clean and rigorous architecture whose content draws on the one-off encounter between programme, place and user.

The son of a well-known film producer father and a mathematician mother, Rafael Viñoly was born in Montevideo, Uruguay, but grew up in Buenos Aires, Argentina. In 1969, three years before completing his architecture studies, 22 year-old Viñoly founded the Estudio de Arquitectura in conjunction with six other architects. A successful firm that in less than a decade became one of the largest in South America.

In Estudio de Arquitectura, Viñoly was considered the creative force, where he actually produced some of his best works. Among the well known projects from that period: a residential building composed of six glass towers linked by aerial bridges; and a television center built of four free-standing windowless studios, mounted like columns on a raised podium containing ancillary accommodation, with an urban park landscaped on its roof. 

A year after Viñoly opened his own firm (1978), he won the competition for the Tokyo International Forum. This dense urban complex is a “microcosm city”, pivoting around an urban park covered with a steel construction - a personal stamp that appears one way or another in almost all of Vinoly’s grandiose works -  Carrasco International Airport; the Brooklyn Children’s Museum; the Kimmel Center for Performing Arts in Philadelphia; the Perelman Center for Advanced Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania; the Cleveland Museum of Art; and the Van Andel Institute and Medical Research Center in Michigan.

Rafael Viñoly was one of the final nine contestants in the competition for re-planning Ground Zero. He now manages his projects from his offices in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, London and Abu Dhabi (of course).