John King:
Transbay Transit Center architect Cesar Pelli explains why he loves grand, complex projects.
NEW HAVEN, Conn. — My favorite San Francisco tower of the past 15 years is 560 Mission St., a simple 31-story rectangle of nonreflective glass traced by a grid of thin steel painted forest-green.
The architect was Cesar Pelli, whose firm has since designed the map-changing behemoths a block away at First and Mission streets: Salesforce Tower and the Transbay Transit Center. And when I asked him in his office last week if he’d rather pursue a precise elegance than tackle huge projects that often get tangled in politics, the 90-yearold designer didn’t even pause.
“I’m very proud of 560 Mission, but the transit center with the tower is much better — more important,” said Pelli, who founded what now is Pelli Clarke Pelli Architects in 1977. “I
the complex projects, the ones that so many people are going to use, that are transformative.”
It’s a straightforward comment, free of the rhetoric that most other architects use to wrap themselves in an artistic mystique. And it helps explain how Pelli went from being dean of the Yale School of Architecture to the head of a 175-employee firm that has altered the skylines on four continents.
There has been a critical trajectory as well: Once revered for his mastery of forms and building skins, Pelli now is shrugged off by some peers as a corporate impresario, his firm producing buildings that are tasteful but tame.
But as far as Pelli is concerned, the transition was an opportunity not to be missed.
“The wonderful thing about those big projects is that they have a large impact on the city,” Pelli said. “That impact, if you plan and design it carefully, can be very much for the good.”
The shift began in the early 1980s, when Pelli was selected to design the World Financial Center in Lower Manhattan, across from the World Trade Center. By the end of the decade, his firm had crafted the New York Museum of Modern Art and London’s Canary Wharf, as well as prestige towers around the world. Among them: a 400-foot tower for Market Street that would have been topped by a 120-foot lattice-like steel crown.
The Market Street tower never got built, a setback that Pelli dismisses: “I don’t feel bad. I was uneasy about how it was progressing.” Nor does he shed tears for completed projects that have since been torn down, including a 1993 atrium redo in San Francisco’s One Market complex that was hailed at the time by The Chronicle’s Allan Temko as “a powerful dose of urbane charm.”
“What can you do?” he asked philosophically. “That’s life. Even dear friends, they die. They go away. Buildings do, too.”
One place they endure, at least in replica, is his firm’s office, which spreads across the top floor of a two-story brick loft across from the Yale campus, a building that Pelli in the early years shared with a trucking firm. Everywhere you look there are models, dozens of models of projects past and present — some no more than stiff sheets of paper glued together, others elaborate miniatures intended to dazzle clients and planning commissions.
“We keep them as references,” Pelli said. Competition entries, for instance. “Maybe we don’t win, but maybe an idea leads to something else. You keep on accumulating experiences and possible answers to the problem.”
This is a problem with the firm’s work, critics say: Too much of what gets produced is interchangeable — refined variations on a vertical theme.
When Pelli was selected with developer Hines in the 2007 competition that (figuratively) cleared the way for San Francisco’s new transit center and new tallest building — each scheduled to open by the end of this year — skeptics harped on the tower’s resemblance to Pelli’s International Finance Centre in Hong Kong. Both are tapered obelisks. So is Pelli’s Torre Costanera, a 980-foot high-rise recently completed in Santiago, Chile.
But Pelli and other princi pals in the firm emphasize the touches that, to them, make a large structure distinct unto itself. The International Finance Centre has sharp corners and a progression of notched setbacks. Torre Constanera is a glass shaft with walls that part at the corners as they rise. Salesforce Tower, by contrast, glides upward without a break and curves smoothly at each corner to provide a visual contrast to the aluminum sunshades that add texture to the tower’s skin.
“We wanted a very special tower in San Francisco, so we pushed ourselves,” Pelli said last week. “This will be a tower you can’t find anywhere else . ... It’s very big, very tall, but still polite and appropriate.”
Those words echo Pelli’s take on our city as a whole.
“San Francisco is a very polite city, a very cultured city — two qualities we tried to instill in the Salesforce Tower,” Pelli explained. As for the negative reaction from longtime Bay Area residents who bristle at the sight of a 1,070foot building taking top honors downtown, Pelli says the size is appropriate for what the newcomer says about the future.
“A tall building serves to mark the sky,” Pelli said. “In this case, it also marks the location of such an important transit center. Those signals are very important. They make a city more understandable.”
Our conversation took place the same day that Salesforce Tower topped off.
At the ceremonial groundbreaking in 2013, Pelli was on hand along with Fred Clarke, a onetime student who has worked with Pelli ever since and was given shared billing in 2005. These days, though, the founder rarely travels: He conserves his energies for the task at hand.
“Up until about 10 years ago, I oversaw every project. Then I started giving pieces to Fred and now he runs the firm,” Pelli said with no visible regret. “I only get involved in a few projects.”
They include Salesforce Tower and the transit center-to-be next door, a streamlined undulation that spans two streets and will be topped by a 5.4-acre public park.
“They’re such exciting projects. My babies!” Pelli said with a hearty laugh. “Joint babies, but my babies. I don’t want to give them to anybody.”