Fine Form

Rafeal Vinoly

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MEA catches up with Rafael Vinoly, the architect behind Tokyo International Forum, Leicester’s Curve Theatre and, more recently, a number of projects in the Middle East.

My first design was a museum for the new city of Brasilia. I remember I built a really tiny model, it looked like an amoeba and it took me about a month to do it. I must have been 15 or something like that.

Architecture is such a punishing profession because each building takes five to seven years. If you’re a fashion designer you have four or five collections a year, and you can be wrong occasionally, but in this profession each project is a big chunk of your life.

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I love the Burj Khalifa. It’s a special building, as nonsensical as it may be. It’s a fantastic form and it just does what it needs to do to enable it to be so tall.

The best building I have ever designed is the Tokyo International Forum.
It gets better as time goes on because it makes sense. It uses function as a way of raising awareness . It explores how to deal with a difficult urban environment.

I don’t think there is a contradiction between function and form; if a building works then it is beautiful.

Architecture is both in a very good place and a very bad place.
We are far freer and faster and more efficient than ever before, but in many situations architecture seems to have transformd into a grandiose form of sculpture.

I believe that the person who is alert to a nation that is not their own, the expat, has the ability to perceive the nuances and the difficulties of a different place, and I think that helps a lot.

What makes this part of the world stunning is not the waterfront, it is the desert.

Everyone thinks you have to be the largest or the weirdest of the lot and that is the problem with architecture, it has been the problem for 30 years.

Architecture is the one form of art you cannot close your eyes to. You cannot avoid it. Even if you were blind you would still have a relationship with buildings, with space.

If there is one good thingabout the financial crisis it is that people are far more conscious of absurdities.

My favorite building is always the one in the making.