Rafael Viñoly

Uruguayan-born architect

Rafael Viñoly Beceiro (born 1944) was a Uruguayan architect.He is the principal of Rafael Viñoly Architects, which he founded in 1983.

The firm has offices in New York City, Palo Alto, London, Manchester, Abu Dhabi, and Buenos Aires.Viñoly has earned a reputation as "a serene functionalist and a master of institutional design," as an unbylined article in Metropolis put it, noting that "schools, civic buildings, convention centers, and the like have long been the mainstay of Viñoly’s practice." "I’m very interested in unglamorousness!" he says, in the same article. "People don’t understand how important this kind of thing" - the human use of buildings, as opposed to architecture as monumental sculpture - "is.

If you remember, 10, 15 years ago, if you weren’t working on a museum you weren’t an architect.With hospitals, that level of snobbism would never have been applicable—nobody gives a royal screw about that stuff.” John Gravois, writing in the UAE National News, applauded Viñoly's "affinity for the nerdy, workmanlike challenges of designing complex institutional architecture: hospitals, a nanosystems institute, a cancer research center.

His buildings often seem designed not to be photographed from the air but to be used and experienced - from both the inside and out.

And he displays the distinctly unstar-like habit of designing structures that respect their neighbors." As well, Gravois observed, he deplores "the insidiousness of contemporary architectural culture," singling out for criticism buildings "that tend to do only one thing, which is to create the sense of fame." Viñoly rose to international prominence with his Tokyo International Forum.

Reviewing the Museum of Modern Art's exhibition of models and drawings for the building while it was still under construction, the New York Times architecture critic Herbert Muschamp hailed Vinoly’s design as “a monument to the idea of openness” that “revives faith in architecture as an instrument of intellectual clarity.”