Building with no borders
Architecture
In Pittsburgh, the tale of the new convention center's design has already achieved the status of legend. Taking a taxi across one of the bridges that span the Allegheny River, connecting the city's north side to downtown, architect Rafael Viñoly sketched a Nike-like swoosh that mimicked the gentle curve of the bridges' suspension cables. Today, that arc is replicated in the 6-acre roof of the David L. Lawrence Convention Center, a stainless steel wave that seems to tumble from the city's skyline into the river below.
Viñoly borrowed more than just the shape from the bridges: The convention center's roof is suspended from above, lashed to a series of vertical masts that allows for 250,000 square feet of column-free exhibition space underneath, one of the largest rooms of its kind in the country. The old convention center, on the same site, was a black box so sealed off from its surroundings--and so dated, both visually and functionally--that it was dubbed "the eight-track." Its $354 million replacement, by contrast, is stunningly transparent: glass walls on all sides, sweeping terraces, and long ribbons of ceiling glass that minimize the need for artificial light.
It's the kind of grand gesture that has catapulted Viñoly, 59, into the stratum of superstar architects. And at least for the moment, he seems to be everywhere, with projects like the future home of Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York, Boston's new convention center, and the University of Chicago's graduate school of business. He has also secured commissions for a major expansion of the Cleveland Museum of Art and a $650 million project to link the Kennedy Center more closely to downtown Washington, D.C.
What makes him so popular? Viñoly delivers highly functional designs that are bold but easy to grasp (echoing the bridges in Pittsburgh, for example). And he has the skill of a pitchman: "Besides feeling space in his bones," says fellow New York architect Michael Sorkin, "he's brilliant at meetings without being threatening." Viñoly's use of glass and metal harks back to modernist structures that began proliferating in the mid-19th century, but the architect goes further than most of his contemporaries in knocking down the walls that traditionally separate private and public space. "He wants to create a new kind of urbanism," says Steven Litt, art and architecture critic for the Plain Dealer in Cleveland. "So when you enter one of his buildings, you're entering an extension of the city's public spaces." Most projects "don't require screaming architecture," Viñoly says, "but a sense of responsibility to the civic realm."
Born in Uruguay and raised in Argentina, Viñoly trained as a concert pianist but abandoned music in college to study architecture, deeming it a more stable career. In 1979, Viñoly, by then a prominent designer in Argentina, left for the United States, opening his New York design shop in the early '80s. But it was a commission for the $1.5 billion Tokyo International Forum that launched his recent building boom. Completed in 1996, the forum features a glass atrium the length of four Olympic-size swimming pools. The New York Times called it "such a perfectly realized building that you may actually find yourself hoping that a flaw will turn up."
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