The Connection between Space and Thinking: An Interview with Rafael Viñoly

Three years ago, a member of my university's project management team came by my office with a set of Bose noise-canceling headphones and some advice: “You're going to need these.” And indeed I did, as just outside my ninth floor window, on the steep slope of Mt. Sutro at the back-side of the University of California San Francisco's (UCSF) Parnassus Campus, a laboratory for stem cell research was about to be constructed. For two-and-half years, I wore those headphones and witnessed, at eye-level, the construction of an unusually elegant and stunningly situated laboratory, all the while trying to secure an interview with its Uruguayan-American architect, Rafael Vinoly (Image 1).