Rafael Viñoly, a Uruguayan architect whose portfolio contains London’s “Walkie-Talkie” constructing, died on Thursday. He was 78.

Román Viñoly

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Román Viñoly

Rafael Viñoly, a Uruguayan architect whose portfolio contains London’s “Walkie-Talkie” constructing, died on Thursday. He was 78.

Román Viñoly

Rafael Viñoly, a Uruguayan-born architect whose award-winning modernist buildings carry a dramatic aptitude to skylines all over the world, has died. He was 78.

Viñoly died of an aneurysm at New York’s Presbyterian Hospital in Lower Manhattan on Thursday, in keeping with his agency.

“I am saddened to report that my father, the founder and namesake of our firm Rafael Viñoly Architects, passed away unexpectedly,” his son and collaborator Román Viñoly wrote in a statement. “He was a visionary who will be missed by all those whose lives he touched through his work.”

His most recognizable works embrace the Tokyo International Forum, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Carrasco Airport in Montevideo, and 20 Fenchurch Street in London — higher referred to as the “Walkie-Talkie” constructing.

Viñoly, whose civic and cultural buildings had been the spine of his portfolio, was preoccupied with the sensible use of his constructions.

“He bears a professional affinity for the nerdy, workmanlike challenges of designing complex institutional architecture: hospitals, a nanosystems institute, a cancer research centre,” mentioned John Gravois, writing for the UAE’s The National in 2010. “His buildings often seem designed not to be photographed from the air but to be used and experienced — from both the inside and out. And he displays the distinctly unstar-like habit of designing structures that respect their neighbours.”

Some of his buildings, nonetheless, have drawn criticism for being unneighborly.

Viñoly designed the infamous “Walkie-Talkie” tower in London’s monetary district, a bulbous constructing whose concave glass facade melted at least one nearby car with its reflection in 2013.

Viñoly later defined the design flaw as the results of a growth course of that he mentioned casts apart the architect.

“One problem that happens in this town, is the super-abundance of consultancies and sub-consultancies that dilute the responsibility of the designer,” he told The Guardian, “to the point that you just don’t know where you are any more.”

Another Viñoly constructing, New York’s skinny skyscraper, 432 Park Avenue — as soon as the world’s tallest residential constructing at nearly 1,400 toes — made headlines for what critics noticed as a blight on Manhattan’s skyline. Residents of the posh flats confronted a spate of construction and engineering problems, together with leaky plumbing, creaky partitions and defective elevators.

The architect outwardly rejected a fame-seeking method he noticed as endemic amongst modern architects.

“I’m very interested in unglamorousness!” he mentioned in a Q&A with Metropolis in 2010. “If you remember, 10, 15 years ago, if you weren’t working on a museum you weren’t an architect. With hospitals, that level of snobbism would never have been applicable — nobody gives a royal screw about that stuff.”

Even as he distanced himself from the function of “architect as glamour oracle,” Gravois wrote in The National, Viñoly “does not appear to shrink from being a larger-than-life, media-ready personality, or from making oracular pronouncements.”

Born in 1944 in Montevideo, Uruguay, Viñoly turned a founding associate of distinguished Argentina-based design studio Estudio de Arquitectura at age 20, in keeping with his agency’s biography. In 1978, Viñoly moved to the U.S. and landed a job as a visitor lecturer on the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, and settled in New York the next yr. In 1983, Viñoly based Rafael Viñoly Architects, a New York City-based agency with places of work in London, Manchester, Abu Dhabi, Buenos Aires, Chicago and Palo Alto.

In addition to his son Román, he’s survived by his spouse Diana, his stepsons Nicolás and Lucas, and his brother Daniel, his firm mentioned.