High drama

Rafael Vinoly landed on the short list of the world’s most hotly pursued architects in 1989, when he defeated 394 contenders in an international competition to design the Tokyo International Forum. The $1.5-billion performing arts and convention center -- a huge glass and steel structure frequently described as a great ship gliding through the central city -- opened in 1997 to widespread acclaim.

Since that spectacular success, Vinoly has snagged dozens of large commissions, from the $43-million Princeton University Stadium and the $265-million Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts in Philadelphia to the $750-million Boston Convention and Exhibition Center. Known for adapting his ideas to a wide variety of sites while nurturing his signature flair for sweeping curves and dramatic roofs, he has won praise for giving classical design an elegant new look.

But his achievements so far are merely a warmup for the current competition to design a replacement for the World Trade Center in New York. Earlier this month the slate of seven architectural teams was narrowed to two: Daniel Libeskind, whose home office is in Berlin, and Think, a New York-based team headed by Vinoly, who is working with architects Frederic Schwartz of New York and Shigeru Ban of Tokyo. Think initially came up with three separate proposals: a “Sky Park” with a rooftop lawn, a “Great Room” plaza spanned by a glass ceiling and the “Towers of Culture,” an open latticework structure that they eventually developed.

With a decision expected as early as Thursday and last-minute modifications in process, Vinoly has never been busier. Usually delighted to talk about his work, he has no time for interviews. Or at least that’s the official word.

But Vinoly, 58, didn’t get where he is by being unapproachable. After winning the Princeton commission, he strolled around the campus, stopping now and then to paint watercolors of existing buildings. As he chatted with students and faculty about plans for the 30,000-seat football stadium, his artwork made the point that he wasn’t some radical modernist bent on upsetting the traditional aesthetic.

In Philadelphia, when proposals for the new performing arts center were under discussion, he demonstrated his skill on the piano, violin and cello at a meeting with project sponsors. The message: This architect knows something about music.

In Tampa, where he has been commissioned to design a $52-million building for the Tampa Museum of Art as the centerpiece of a downtown cultural district, Vinoly gave his e-mail address to about 400 civic leaders who attended a forum and encouraged constructive criticism. Just last week, he unveiled a new version of his design -- altered in response to public feedback.

“He is very inspirational,” says Emily Kass, director of the Tampa museum. “He helps people understand what he is doing in a context that’s larger than just the building, how it fits into the setting and urban design.”

Cleveland also has encountered Vinoly’s persuasive charms. “The most magical moment was about a year ago,” says Katharine Lee Reid, director of the venerable Cleveland Museum of Art. Standing on stage with a drafting board at the downtown Ohio Theater, before an audience of 1,000, Vinoly drew his plans for a $225-million renovation and expansion of the museum. As he talked about his plan -- to bridge two parts of the existing structure with curvilinear additions and a dramatic courtyard topped by one of his typical flourishes, a cantilevered glass roof -- the drawings-in-progress were projected on the big screen behind him.

“You could have heard a pin drop,” Reid says.

Sometimes characterized as quintessentially international, Vinoly was born in Montevideo, Uruguay, in 1944, and moved to Buenos Aires with his family when he was 5. He studied architecture at the University of Buenos Aires and established his practice in Argentina but moved to New York in 1979. Now headquartered in Manhattan, he has offices in London and Buenos Aires, and projects scattered around the globe.

When he tells his life story, Vinoly says his father, Roman -- whose parents moved to Uruguay from the Canary Islands -- always thought of himself as an immigrant and “developed an enduring theatrical view of life” as a youth, while working in a traveling circus. He started his career as a radio announcer, then directed theater and opera and produced films. Rafael’s mother, Maria Becerio, studied architecture and sparked her son’s interest in the field but became a mathematics teacher.

As a child, Rafael Vinoly seemed destined to be a concert pianist, but when it came time to enter college, he decided to pursue architecture. Music seemed “dangerous,” he says, like his father’s work in the theater. Architecture offered more security. What’s more, he had a prodigious talent for drawing, which would prove to be a major asset.

Throwing himself into architecture, he stopped playing the piano for a decade. These days, he dismisses attempts to draw parallels between architecture and music. Mastery of the craft is essential in both fields, he says, and his knowledge of music has helped with commissions such as Jazz at Lincoln Center, a Manhattan performing arts center that’s under construction, and the Kimmel Center in Philadelphia, which opened in 2001. At the Kimmel, he conceived one of the auditoriums as a musical instrument and designed it in the shape of a cello.

But he disagrees with the notion of architecture as “frozen music,” attributed to German philosopher Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Architecture cannot be as abstract as music, contends Vinoly, who has described his field as “an art of dealing with heaviness.” What’s more, buildings are not independent aesthetic statements, he says.

Cooking analogies are another matter. “You don’t simply accept the client’s program at face value, as if your job is to be some kind of short-order cook,” he says in a book about his work, published by his office. “What you really want to do is figure out the underlying needs, which the client may never have fully understood. Then you work to define the program.”

At a public forum in Cleveland, he told the audience: “You are not going to get a pre-cooked meal but something especially prepared for the Cleveland Museum of Art.”

By any account, Vinoly was something of a prodigy. He won his first architectural competition at 18, in 1962, the year he entered the School of Architecture at the University of Buenos Aires. He designed a new workshop for the school’s woodworking program, which was built but demolished several years later when the school moved to new quarters. Two years later, while still a student, he teamed up with older architects and formed the Estudio de Arquitectura, a collaborative practice that would be his professional home for 14 years.

He left the university in 1966, amid a repressive period when violence erupted on campus. Two years later, after further study at an alternative school, he passed Argentina’s licensing examination for architects.

By 1978, the Estudio de Arquitectura had designed 116 buildings and completed more than 50 of them, nearly all in Argentina. They include office towers, residential complexes, health-care facilities, banks, a soccer stadium and an austerely adventurous house with two towers, where Vinoly lived with his wife, Diana Braguinsky, and sons Nicolas, Lucas and Roman.

Despite his success, Vinoly found himself working in an increasingly authoritative and oppressive society. When he went home one day and discovered that his personal library had been searched and that some of his books in foreign languages had been deemed suspicious, he decided to leave the country. He became a visiting professor of architecture at Harvard University School of Design in 1978 and moved his family to New York the following year.

Vinoly didn’t have a license to practice architecture in the United States, so he worked as a developer for a few years, in partnership with Italian and Argentine investors, and taught architecture at various universities. His first break was at the City University of New York’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

It began simply, in 1987, when he was hired to convert a historic high school building into a research library, but he ultimately designed an adjacent building that houses a theater, swimming pool, gymnasium, indoor track and tennis courts. That project led to other important commissions -- most notably the Lehman College Physical Education Facility in Bronx, which has won praise for its dramatic curved roof and sensitivity to the site.

Still, it was the Tokyo International Forum that propelled Vinoly to architectural stardom. The Museum of Modern Art in New York presented an exhibition of models and drawings of the 1.5-million-square-foot building while it was still under construction. Reviewing the show, New York Times architecture critic Herbert Muschamp wrote that Vinoly’s design is “a monument to the idea of openness” and that it “revives faith in architecture as an instrument of intellectual clarity.” In 1998, the year after the building opened, Muschamp dubbed Vinoly “the most elegant architect now practicing in the United States.”

In an Architectural Record review of Philadelphia’s Kimmel Center, critic Suzanne Stephens wrote: “Vinoly knows how to create a big architectural whammy” and noted the latest examples: the Kimmel’s “shimmering, barrel-vaulted roof,” its “sun-splashed atrium” and “the piece de resistance,” the cello-shaped, mahogany-clad auditorium.

Users of his buildings also praise his work. Princeton’s stadium, a modern version of a Roman aqueduct, is “the crown jewel of football stadiums on the East Coast,” says Jim Fiore, the university’s associate director of athletics. “It’s a icon for a university that’s known for academics and it meshes perfectly with the traditional buildings.”

But Vinoly also has detractors, even among his fans. Muschamp, who has championed the architect’s design for the World Trade Center, has criticized Vinoly’s “weakness for dull walls” that function as plain curtains over more exciting interiors. The Lehman gymnasium, for example, is “a ravishingly fluid design,” but “the rear is as glum as the front is radiant,” he complained. Muschamp found similar fault with the Kimmel Center’s exterior: “I find its passive aggression hard to take.”

After lauding spectacular aspects of the Kimmel’s interior, Stephens found the exterior “oppressive” and concluded that the building failed to deliver the “breathtakingly new civic image” that the city wanted.

Architects who work in the public realm must take such criticism in stride. And it’s hard to imagine a more closely watched commission than the World Trade Center. His team’s design would replace the original twin towers with soaring cylinders of steel latticework, with various buildings suspended inside. Libeskind’s plan is anchored by a huge void that preserves the footprints of the destroyed towers.

“Architecture is like politics,” Vinoly has said. “You have an idea, and then you find a way to implement it. In general, of course, it is less connected to a vision of where the country should go than to a very localized problem: this day, this program, this site, this client.”