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A MASTERMIND OF MAMMOTH PROJECTS, RAFAEL VINOLY CREATES LIGHT-FILLED STRUCTURES OF DRAMATIC STRENGTH
Born in Montevideo, trained in Buenos Aires, and now headquartered in New York City, architect Rafael Vinoly oversees a practice as quintessentially international as his origins. As the author of elegant buildings on several continents, Vinoly shuns postmodernist and deconstructionist formulas in favor of site-specific designs, which critics have praised for their clean, graceful lines and intelligent, inner logic. Although he is at home with smaller structures like private residences and retail interiors, the architect's reputation rests mainly upon large-scale projects-university buildings, courthouses, performing arts centers, and sports facilities-which he and his team of assistants design from offices in New York, Buenos Aires, and Tokyo.
He is best known for his masterful Tokyo International Forn, a complex containing 1.5 million square feet of floor space at a cost of $1.5 billion which, despite its great size, possesses a human scale, a sense of accessibility, and a spirit of fun. The Tokyo Forum is considered by many to be one of the great buildings of the decade, its ingenious manipulation of space and light, refined use of materials, and meticulous detailing earning the fifty-four-year-old architect a place among his profession's elite.
Then-governor of Tokyo Shunichi Suzuki launched the Tokyo Forum during Japan's economic boom of the early eighties as both a business and cultural venture. (imagine combining Chicago's Merchandise Mart with New York's Lincoln Center.)
"You could say the Forum represents art driven by a government engine," Vinoly explains. "In the west we tend to separate art and commerce but at the end of the day, the two are aspects of one."
Suzuki believed the Forum could provide much-needed focus and definition to Tokyo's sprawling, chaotic "empty center" (a term used by French critic Roland Barthes) while also symbolizing a national agenda much as the Pompidou Center did in Paris. By relocating a number of civic entities and purchasing several privately held parcels, the municipal governor pieced together nearly seven acres of public land near the Imperial Palace as a site for the new center. He recruited master architects I. M. Pei and Kenzo Tange (among others) to jury an international design competition which attracted 395 entries from sixty-eight countries and from...