About Rafael Viñoly Architects Training and Research Programs
Launched in 2005, the Architectural Training and Research Programs are a response to the need for the practice of architecture to return more of what is learned through designing and constructing buildings to the field itself. Each program creates a space in which architectural knowledge can be developed free of the constraints of particular projects, sites, budgets, or programs – yet informed at every step by the realities of practice. Each has a specific goal and rationale.
The research program awards grants to individual researchers with ideas and the passion to explore them. The only requirements have been that the ideas have the potential to improve the craft or practice of architecture and that they benefit from being carried out within the context of a busy architectural office. Researchers have worked as Resident Fellows in close association with architects, engineers, graphic designers, and model makers at Rafael Viñoly Architects, and with non-profit and industry partners.
In 2008, to commemorate its twenty-fifth anniversary, the firm has for the first time awarded multiple research grants, with an emphasis on international themes.
The training program was established to provide a tuition-free, fourteen-week fall course that develops the operational and intellectual instruments that form the basis of practice. The program, which is not to be considered a substitute for a formal architectural education, was created for advanced students and practicing architects who find a significant gap between their formative instruction and the challenges they face as professionals, presenting architectural expertise not as an intuitive ability that comes only with experience, but as a body of knowledge that can be taught. Classes have been offered by Rafael Viñoly and his colleagues.
In 2008, the course’s faculty and other interested architects in the firm decided to redesign the program, looking directly at the firm’s own experience in training young architects as a basis for evaluating the curriculum. The new curriculum was organized around a few central questions: How do architects learn to make good decisions within the context of a project, a schedule, and a budget? How do they learn what they need to know to make decisions? How do they learn what questions to ask?
The Fall 2009 training program is currently under development. Rather than issue a call for new research proposals in 2010, the research program will focus on supporting and presenting the work of the 2009 research fellows.
