Since 1978, the architect Rafael Viñoly lived and worked in the United States – but he designed his best works for his native Uruguay, where he was born in Montevideo in 1944: Anyone departing from the airport there today will be handled in a building whose roof arches like the wing of a futuristic flying object and puts the traveler in a joyful restlessness of departure. The white curve made of steel and concrete, completed in 2009, is somewhat reminiscent of the masterpieces of tropical swing modernism by Oscar Niemeyer from neighbouring Brazil to the north. For the lagoon of Maldonado, also in Uruguay, Viñoly designed a bridge that has never been seen before – it runs in its middle towards a roundabout floating above the water on concrete steles.

Niklas Maak

Editor in the arts section.

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Rafael Viñoly Beceiro was born as the son of a theatre director and a mathematics teacher, which perhaps explains two characteristics of his architecture – the theatrical appearance of his buildings and their mathematical daring. In 1978, ten years after completing his architectural studies in Buenos Aires, Viñoly moved to the United States and founded his own practice in 1983, which quickly grew into a successful global company and did not always produce masterpieces.

A giant razor

Nevertheless, Viñoly manages to create buildings that are not forgotten – including the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts with its glass barrel roof in Philadelphia or the Sussex Sport Center in Georgetown, Delaware, which looks like a giant American barn and combines this traditional typology with a futuristic solar roof. Also not to forget the skyscraper "20 Fenchurch Street" in London, which looks like a huge, ergonomically shaped shaver. From the publicly accessible, glass Sky Garden at the top you have a great view over the city. But the concave curved façade causes trouble – once the falling wind rushing down it accelerated so strongly that it whirled an old lady into the air at the foot of the building; and sometimes the reflective, curved glass façade concentrates the sun's rays like a magnifying glass, melting the plastic attachments of parked cars.

Another building that made Viñoly famous is "432 Park Avenue" – a 425-meter-high, breathtakingly narrow skyscraper in Manhattan with a hundred apartments; the most expensive was sold for 88 million euros. Here, too, there were complaints: In strong winds, the elevators of the building, which swayed in the wind, sometimes fail for more than an hour because of the beating cables, the partitions groan ghostly, the garbage chutes, say the residents, made noises as if a bomb were detonating.

But when you see the matchstick-slender, gridded tower appear like a fantastic stalagmite in the skyline of Midtown, you have to admit that Viñoly enriches the typology of the skyscraper and has invented his own beauty of the impossible. Now the architect has died in New York at the age of 78.