Plotting the City of London’s skyline in the new millennium was a bit like sitting at a kitchen table with a bowl of vegetables and a selection of utensils. First someone places a cut-off gherkin on the table and then someone else puts down an upright cheese grater nearby. A folded napkin and a curving can of ham are added. The Uruguayan architect Rafael Viñoly rather spoilt the culinary theme by placing a big, fat walkie-talkie in their midst.
The 37-storey, 160m-high skyscraper overlooking the River Thames at 20 Fenchurch Street failed to attract the acclaim of Lord Foster’s Swiss Re Building (the Gherkin, 2004) or Lord Rogers’s Leadenhall Building (the Cheese Grater, 2014) when it opened in 2015. Critics said Viñoly’s contribution was too big and incongruous, ruining views of the Tower of London nearby.
Planners at the Corporation of London, ever wary of competition for wealthy tenants being offered by Canary Wharf a few miles upriver, pushed the scheme through despite strong misgivings from English Heritage, which called it a “brutally dominant expression of commercial floor space” and an “oppressive and overwhelming form”. Viñoly was unapologetic: “Am I breaking the illusion that we’re living in the 13th century? The view from the Tower of London is already ruined.”
The City’s chief planner Peter Rees justified planning permission on the basis that Viñoly’s design would create a “Babylonian roof garden” on the top storey, a free-to-enter public park in the skies offering spectacular views. Viñoly praised Rees as a “remarkable bureaucrat” and enraged conservationists by claiming that it was right for visionaries to have unfettered power to improve London’s skyline.
“If Louis XIV hadn’t been the king, then Paris wouldn’t have happened — right?” said Viñoly, a self-confessed “24/7 architecture geek” with bushy black eyebrows and lustrous white hair. His svelte appearance was compromised by three pairs of glasses of differing strength — depending on the level of detailing he was paying attention to — which hung around his neck on pieces of string and gave him a slightly whimsical, madcap air.
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The public appeared to give the Walkie Talkie the thumbs down when it was voted Britain’s worst building in 2015. Its perceived deficiencies were rendered more conspicuous by “death rays” from the building’s concave mirrored-glass façade, which melted the plastic logo of a Jaguar limousine in a car park underneath. Horizontal fins were retrofitted to the south façade to lessen the “Walkie Scorchie” effect, but there was not much that could be done to stop people being blown off their feet on the street below because the inverted shape of the building had created a tunnel that funnelled wind downwards.
Viñoly called architecture “the art of dealing with heaviness” and embraced that challenge with a dense form that gave more column-free space to the more expensive upper storeys.
Apologists for the building praised Viñoly for creating a large mass to accommodate 6,000 people that still looked elegant and attractive. As the building was completed, a sign was put up at street level declaring that “Big thinkers need big floors”. The notion was taken up by a Hong Kong-based food company Lee Kum Kee, which bought the building from the developer LandSec for £1.3 billion. At the time it was the highest price paid in Britain for a single building and netted LandSec 167 per cent of what it cost to build. Skyscraper developers beat a path to Viñoly’s door.
Rafael Viñoly Beceiro was born in Montevideo, Uruguay, in 1944 to Román Viñoly Barreto, a film and theatre director, and Maria Beceiro, a maths teacher and former architecture student. When he was five the family moved to Buenos Aires, Argentina, where his father directed a production of the Wagner opera Die Walküre.
High culture extended to the dinner table, where the Viñoly family talked about the architecture of Le Corbusier and the conducting of Toscanani. From early on Viñoly was contributing fluently to both debates. He was classically trained on the piano and one of his best friends in Buenos Aires was a promising young pianist called Daniel Barenboim. However, when he left school Viñoly studied architecture at the University of Buenos Aires and the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism. In 1964 he co-founded Estudio de Arquitectura in the city.
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He never felt secure after a military coup in 1966. The junta was suspicious of “intellectuals” and some of Viñoly’s friends “disappeared”. Viñoly proved himself useful to the latest military regime with a series of commissions for the 1978 football World Cup in Argentina, including a stadium in Mendoza. His star rose higher when the home nation won the tournament, but that did not stop his home being raided. When a French Larousse dictionary was found, the secret police thought it was code for “La Russe” and suspected him of being a Soviet sympathiser and a Marxist.
In 1979 he fled Argentina with his wife Diana, an interior designer, and their son Román, now a director at Rafael Viñoly Architects. Both survive him along with his stepsons Nicolás and Lucas.
Initially Viñoly taught at Harvard before settling in New York City. In 1983 he founded Rafael Viñoly Architects and began to attract global recognition after winning a competition to design the Tokyo International Forum. Completed in 1996, the exhibition centre sealed Viñoly’s reputation as an architect who could realise soaring open spaces with confidence, exemplified by the 225m-long, 60m-high atrium that towered over the rest of the building like an inverted ship hull.
Back in his adopted country, he showed his versatility with a modernist boxy addition to the Cleveland Museum of Art (2009), the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago and a medical research building at the University of California in San Francisco. And while the Walkie Talkie was causing distortion in London, across the pond Viñoly designed 432 Park Avenue, the highest residential skyscraper when it was completed in 2015. The 425m “super-skinny” tower was a paean to the modernist Mies van der Rohe. It looked as restrained and elegant as one of the Van der Rohe’s masterful skyscrapers, but it was not as functional. Residents complained of flooding, loud noises and being trapped in the lifts. Viñoly admitted to “screw ups”, saying it was built too quickly because of commercial pressures.
Bad publicity could be absorbed when there were Viñoly buildings rising all over the world. He had planted his flag in Britain with projects including the Curve Theatre in Leicester and the Firstsite arts centre in Colchester, Essex, dubbed the “Golden Banana” on account of its crescent shape and golden panels. Some thought it a curious neighbour to the Roman ruins nearby, but it was undoubtedly more attractive than the concrete multistorey car park that had originally occupied the site.
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In 2008 Viñoly was appointed to plan the £5.5 billion redevelopment of Battersea Power Station in London. A chirpy character with a ready smile who solved problems by retiring to the piano in his office to play when he needed to think, Viñoly professed to being unconcerned about the four previous failed attempts to redevelop the site with its centrepiece brick power station designed by Giles Gilbert Scott. Indeed, Viñoly said that he thought it would be a “piece of cake” until he realised that the site was a “massive cul-de-sac with very little access”, and set about “opening up envelopes”, or, in non-architecture speak, improving access.
Unsentimental about the art deco power station, which he associated with the burning coal that emitted plumes of black smoke, he proposed a 300m-tall “eco funnel” to dwarf the four replacement chimneys of the original power station. This time the heritage lobby got their way and the idea was dropped.
Delivering to the developer’s brief, he shrugged off criticism that he was specifying overly dense luxury development abutting the old power station. The project has been deemed a success, commercially at least, with buildings designed by Frank Gehry and Lord Foster adding glamour. The US government has relocated its embassy there and shoppers flock to the retail spaces at weekends.
As a football lover who liked to watch Premier League highlights while having a shower in the morning, Viñoly brought South American flair — rivalling that on the pitch from Manchester City’s many Latin players — with his design for the club’s training ground and academy, which includes a 7,000-seat stadium.
Of his most famous British building, Viñoly had always predicted that the Walkie Talkie would become an accepted, even loved, feature of London’s skyline.
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Its beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but Viñoly was proud of the fact that he had made his mark on the British capital. “You can like it or dislike it, but you’re not going to forget it.”
Rafael Viñoly, architect, was born on June 1, 1944. He died of an aneurysm on March 2, 2023, aged 78