BUILDING ON AN ELEGANT CURVE.

• Author: Bach, Caleb

A MASTERMIND OF MAMMOTH PROJECTS, RAFAEL VINOLY CREATES LIGHT-FILLED STRUCTURES OF DRAMATIC STRENGTH TO PERSUADE SPONSORS TO SPEND EXTRA FOR AN ALL-WOOD CONCERT HALL, HE USED A CELLO AND VIOLIN IN HIS OFFICE

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 Forum, 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 which Vinoly's team emerged victorious.

"I made no special concessions to Japaneseness," Vinoly confesses. "I think they liked the clarity and directness of our solution, the strong shapes and lack of sophistication. To be honest, I saw it as a social project, a piece of the city. I wanted to create a sense that the people owned the building, that it was part of the public realm, not a creation of private business. There was no typology, no superficiality. It was completely site determined and unusually rigorous for Japan."

In January 1997 the Tokyo Forum officially opened to widespread acclaim and only a modicum of controversy. ("If it wasn't controversial, it wouldn't have been any good," Vinoly laughs.) With its four separate theaters (one with five thousand seats, Japan's largest), numerous restaurants and retail outlets, exhibition areas for trade fairs, reception facilities, conference centers, indoor gardens, and ample underground parking, almost immediately it became a popular refuge for Tokyoites weary of their city's noise and congestion. Thanks to a special double foundation separated by pads, the building neither trembles nor rattles despite its close proximity to two major subway lines. Structural engineer Kunio Watanabe, in collaboration with Vinoly, also employed a variety of other innovative features to insure the structure could withstand major earthquakes. But for many of its fans, the Forum's most stunning feature seems to be its Glass Hall, an elliptical structure with a spine and ribs of aluminum containing some twenty-six hundred panels of tempered glass that soars seven stories above an enclosed garden plaza. The striking form, which Herbert Muschamp of the New York Times has likened to "a lighter-than-air-vessel ... a great ship cutting through the Tokyo cityscape," more than fulfilled the original goal: that of a dramatic new landmark befitting Tokyo's status as a great trading and cultural center. "In its airiness, its interplay of light, shadow, and sound, some have likened it to a cathedral," Vinoly muses, "It's funny. I have the same impression even though I didn't intend to do that. One can...