Rafael Viñoly, Global Architect of Landmark Buildings, Dies at 78

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Uruguayan-born and New York-based, he was responsible for major commercial and cultural buildings in nearly a dozen countries.

By Fred A. Bernstein

Rafael Viñoly, a Uruguayan-born architect whose New York-based firm, founded in 1983, was responsible for major commercial and cultural buildings in nearly a dozen countries, died on Thursday at a hospital in Manhattan. He was 78.

The cause was an aneurysm, said his son, Roman, who is a director at the firm.

Mr. Viñoly, a modernist, was not known for a signature style. But he did have a penchant for enclosing large spaces under glass, creating luminous interiors. His addition to the Cleveland Museum of Art, his Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts in Philadelphia and his Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago all feature dramatic glass-roofed courtyards.

In New York, Mr. Viñoly may have been best known for 432 Park Avenue, a condo tower that, at nearly 1,400 feet, was briefly the tallest residential building in the world. Its gridded exterior has been praised by critics for its restrained elegance, even as it has been faulted for encroaching on Manhattan’s skyline.

In addition, residents, some of whom paid tens of millions of dollars for their apartments, have complained of engineering and construction problems, some of them quite serious. Their complaints have fueled a stream of articles, including one on the front page of The New York Times, on the travails of owning such superluxury properties.

Mr. Viñoly was at once a 24-7 architecture geek and a bon vivant with a penchant for French wines. He wore multiple pairs of black-framed glasses around his neck to make sure he always had the right pair with him, and he was ready to sketch the most arcane architectural details.

He was also a classically trained pianist who gave recitals in a music pavilion on his property in Water Mill, N.Y., on eastern Long Island. In 2011, he told The Times that he owned nine pianos, including one that he helped develop, with a curved keyboard making some notes easier to reach.

“Not many people thought the piano needed to be reinvented,” said the architect David Rockwell, who worked with Mr. Viñoly on several projects. “He was voraciously curious.”

In a 2003 Times profile, Robin Finn described Mr. Viñoly as “a black-clad wraith with a madcap nimbus of silvery hair” who “could run a charm school in his spare time, if he had any.”

He was also extraordinarily loyal to his adopted hometown; he pointed out, with pride, that he had designed buildings in all five boroughs. (They included athletic facilities at Lehman College in the Bronx; the Brooklyn Children’s Museum, which he renovated; and a new police station house in Staten Island.)

After the World Trade Center towers were destroyed in 2001, Mr. Viñoly and the architect Frederic Schwartz helped form the Think Team, which took an innovative approach to reconstituting the 16 acres of ground zero. Its key proposal was for a new pair of twin towers to be built as skeletons, vast filigree structures into which cultural buildings would be inserted over time.

The proposal was the first choice of the committee convened to pick a scheme for rebuilding the World Trade Center, but its decision was overturned by Gov. George E. Pataki, who chose a scheme by Daniel Libeskind.

Mr. Rockwell, who was also on the team, said it was “largely driven by Rafael’s idealism.”

In addition to the attention-getting buildings, Mr. Viñoly’s firm designed some relatively utilitarian structures. “I’m very interested in unglamorousness!” he told Metropolis magazine in 2010, somewhat unconvincingly. And even his unglamorous projects somehow turned glamorous, often with the help of his sun-filled courtyards. His first New York project was the transformation of an old high school into the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, a project that included shimmering cascades of glass.

He converted an old library into the Bernard and Anne Spitzer School of Architecture at the City College of New York. In 1994 he designed a new interior for the Queens Museum of Art that included a swoopy ramp for viewing the building’s scale model of New York City. He also used glass to great effect when he designed the snazzy home of Jazz at Lincoln Center, overlooking Central Park.

His other U.S. projects included a popular stadium at Princeton University, which replaced a crumbling masonry structure. Reviewing the new building in 1998, Herbert Muschamp, then the architecture critic of The Times, wrote that “the palette is on the raw side” and “the aggregate is not a pretty color.” Yet he called Mr. Viñoly “the most elegant architect now practicing in the United States.”

His building for the Booth School of Business featured a towering glass atrium. But the building stepped down almost to the ground as it approached Frank Lloyd Wright’s low-slung Robie House across the street. Unlike many campus buildings, the architecture blogger Kenneth Caldwell wrote, “It’s big when it needs to be big and small when it needs to be small.”

Mr. Viñoly also designed convention centers in Pittsburgh and Boston. His Tokyo International Forum (a convention center and performance venue) resembled, in part, a ship inverted under glass. When it opened in 1997, Mr. Muschamp called it “lucid, whole and completely straightforward, qualities that have not enjoyed wide favor in architecture for some time.”

Rafael Viñoly was born in Montevideo, Uruguay, on June 1, 1944, to Román Viñoly Barreto, a film and theater director, and Maria Beceiro, a math teacher. He studied architecture at the University of Buenos Aires, but even before graduation he had started Estudio de Arquitectura Manteola-Petchersky-Sánchez Gómez-Santos-Solsona-Viñoly, a firm that went on to produce buildings throughout South America.

Argentina was a dangerous place for intellectuals under the military regime that seized power in 1976. In 1978, Mr. Viñoly obtained a teaching position at Harvard University and was able to flee Argentina with his family. (Rabbi Marshall Meyer, later of Manhattan’s Congregation B’nai Jeshurun but then a human-rights activist in Argentina, helped.) In 1979 the family settled in New York, where Mr. Viñoly founded Rafael Viñoly Architects PC in 1983.

In addition to his son, Mr. Viñoly’s survivors include his wife, Diana, an interior designer; his stepsons, Nicolas and Lucas Michael; a granddaughter; and three step-grandchildren.

The same large expanses of glass that Mr. Viñoly loved sometimes betrayed him. In Philadelphia, his Kimmel Center placed several auditoriums under a vast, vaulted glass roof. But the roof caused climate-control and noise-control problems, requiring extensive adjustments by engineers.

In 2010, The Las Vegas Review-Journal reported that sunlight reflecting off the south facing wall of Mr. Viñoly’s Vdara Hotel was making parts of the pool deck dangerously hot. Developers, acknowledging that the concave shape of the 57-story tower caused “a solar convergence,” installed a non-reflecting coating on the building.

In 2013, sun bouncing off Mr. Viñoly’s 20 Fenchurch Street in London, a tower nicknamed the Walkie Talkie, melted parts of a car parked on a nearby street. The developer solved the problem there by attaching horizontal fins to the building’s south facade. Later that year, Mr. Viñoly, visiting London, told Oliver Wainwright, the architecture critic of The Guardian, that the problem resulted from a development process in Britain in which the architect is often sidelined.

What “happens in this town,” he told Mr. Wainwright, “is the superabundance of consultancies and sub-consultancies that dilute the responsibility of the designer,” with the result that “you just don’t know where you are any more.”

An earlier version of this obituary referred incorrectly to the affiliation of Rabbi Marshall Meyer, who as a human-rights activist in Argentina helped Mr. Viñoly and his family leave the country in 1978, with Congregation B’nai Jeshurun in Manhattan. Rabbi Meyer was with the congregation until his death in 1993.

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