Over the course of a career spanning four decades, Rafael Viñoly has built a reputation as an architect’s architect, a serene functionalist and a master of institutional design. Schools, civic buildings, convention centers, and the like have long been the mainstay of Viñoly’s practice—but in just the last few years, the health-care industry has become his particular architectural demesne. With six innovative projects recently completed or currently underway, Viñoly has staked out a position in the advance guard of medical science, even as the state of the art changes from day to day with new discoveries and new breakthroughs. I caught up with Viñoly to ask how he keeps up.

There’s a lot of bad hospitals out there, design-wise and otherwise. What is your firm trying to do differently?

There are a couple of areas in which these buildings have really failed in the past: one is in terms of their ability to accommodate changes in technology and science; and two, in going beyond a decorative approach to really improve the experience of the researcher, the doctor, and the patient. I think that the problem is that it’s always been the area of a reduced number of specialties. You’ve seen the same thing with transportation, everything getting outsourced to large acronym firms. I think that architects have to challenge that. Having a more curious approach—that’s something we at least think we have.

So how do you find out how these facilities actually work?

We start by setting up an office in the hospital, and our team develops a day-to-day relationship with the people who work there. You need to be constantly addressing this question of how you make a group understand their relationship with the other groups in the overall fabric—and how their field is changing. Research is not something that ends when you put pencil to paper. Read more…