Rafael Viñoly

Rating:
Summary: Rafael Viñoly
Review: As the senior member of the ad-hoc Think team, Viñoly came in a close second in the competition to rebuild Ground Zero, and earlier won acclaim for the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts Center in Philadelphia, and Tokyo International Forum. Each lifts the spirits, as surely as this ugly, congested compendium depresses them. However, Viñoly's account of leaving junta-run Argentina and re-establishing himself in New York is riveting. (Michael Webb is the book reviewer for LA Architect magazine.)

Rating:
Summary: Rafael Viñoly
Review: As the senior member of the ad-hoc Think team, Viñoly came in a close second in the competition to rebuild Ground Zero, and earlier won acclaim for the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts Center in Philadelphia, and Tokyo International Forum. Each lifts the spirits, as surely as this ugly, congested compendium depresses them. However, Viñoly's account of leaving junta-run Argentina and re-establishing himself in New York is riveting. (Michael Webb is the book reviewer for LA Architect magazine.)

Rating:
Summary: Fuzzy Structuralism
Review: The 320 page monograph designed by Lars Muller catalogues the works of Viñoly to date. It is a comprehensive representation of projects from his formative years in Argentina to some of his most recent completed buildings including the David L. Lawrence Convention Center in Pittsburgh. Organized around an unorthodox sequential composition, the oversized book began with a series of medium scale civic and public projects in Buenos Aires and ended with the relatively acclaimed Kimmel Center for the Arts in Philadelphia. A seemingly intentional theme, Muller created a premise of "labyrinth clarity" which forces one to interact with the intertwining projects via a shifting physical toss.

There are moments in the book when images of the architectural projects were momentarily interrupted, one of which is a compiled interview, where Viñoly speaks about his first ever winning project as a student; to his over-mystified entry to the architecture scene in New York; to how his office grew disproportionally after the Tokyo Forum Competition was won. Another porosity break in the book was an essay by Joan Ockman, where she describes the practice of Viñoly as the emerging "Third" typology. Positioned somewhere in-between the fields of large corporate offices and the small "boutique" design firms, enjoying the benefits of working along the margins of both.

A beautifully composed yet shamelessly reproduced book, the monograph emphasizes Viñoly's interest in the pursuit of "explicit structuralism" and 70's Dutch Structuralist. While working under no particular formal language, his works continues to evolve around the use of implicit and/ or explicit structural negotiations. Best representative of that idea is the project in Pittsburgh, where a sense of fuzzy structuralism is expressed through the dialogue between the structure and the skin. As it can be seen by the selected images, spaces are walled with expressively apparent structural dependency while it bears an indirect relationship to the use of finished materials.

The book in many ways seems to reflect intimately to the practice and the works of Rafael Viñoly as a meeting place between the empirical and the anticipatory.

C.C. Hwang