HHMI: IS THERE A TENSION BETWEEN THE NOTION THAT THIS IS A BUILDING ABOUT NATURE AND ABOUT HIGH-TECH, ADVANCED SCIENCE?

RV: At the end of the day, Janelia Farm is a highly technical structure. The requirements for services, air exchange, equipment, programmatic space, and flexibility in the lab configuration were enormously demanding. How do you design this huge, intricate machine to be part of nature? The drive to resolve that tension was built into the very idea of Janelia Farm. If you're HHMI and you decide to make this enormous leap into the future, you could have chosen any place in the world to do it. Choosing this particular site determines something. You want all of these top scientists to move to the country. What are you going to do? Try to transform the country into a city? No, it's the country. The Institute's fundamental idea at Janelia Farm was that you are in an unconstrained connection through your work with nature. If the building is any good, it's because this idea behind Janelia Farm is very good.

HHMI: HOW DO YOU AS THE ARCHITECT MEASURE THE SUCCESS OF JANELIA FARM?

RV: Janelia Farm doesn't need anything other than to produce great work and to provide a setting to produce that level of thinking. So what matters here above all is the building's capacity to generate some level of happiness. When you've done this right, it's not because the building becomes famous or noticeable. It's because people take possession of it. I believe that a building's audience, not the critics, is always right. If that audience at Janelia Farm, mainly the people who live and work there, is happy, then we were right in our idea. You can't fake that.

A native of Uruguay, Rafael Viñoly founded Rafael Viñoly Architects, P.C., in 1983. Its offices are in New York City and London.

Interview by Marc Wortman

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