César Pelli
Innovative architect whose skyscrapers transformed the skylines of cities around the world
CÉSAR PELLI, the Argentine-american architect, who has died aged 92, was the foremost designer of skyscrapers of his generation; his buildings, which combine practicality with artistic sensitivity to great effect, have changed the skyline of cities around the world as well as throughout America.
Opposed to “signature architecture”, Pelli experimented with form and material without compromising the unity of his work, which was characterised by his preoccupation with transparency and skins. Though his modern use of materials and form drew criticism when he was building in historic areas, Pelli was always concerned to assimilate local cultures and climates as sources of inspiration.
Thus the amber stone and white marble of the Norwest Centre in Minneapolis (1983-87) were chosen to complement the Minnesota sky, and London’s soft, foggy light led him to a carefully selected stainless steel cladding for London’s One Canada Square: “It will gleam,” he predicted at the time, “but gently, giving the building a very soft silhouette against the skyline.”
He compared his role as designer of “the first true skyscraper in London” to that of Inigo Jones when Jones gently introduced the Tuscan form of classicism to London with his St Paul’s church in Covent Garden by using a simple, archetypal form rather than a personal elaboration. Pelli chose the obelisk shape for his tower, an embodiment of what he saw as the archetypal characteristics of a skyscraper, the pointed top and more than one axis of symmetry.
Pelli’s original design was taller and sleeker, but London City Airport, afraid of collisions, insisted on reducing the height by five storeys. To make up for lost floor space, the width was increased, and Pelli, typically accepting of such restrictions, reduced the apparent bulk of the tower by eroding its corners.
The tower was controversial, acclaimed by some for the rich combination of massive form and dematerialising surface, but criticised for its size and location. “If London wants to be a financial capital,” Pelli replied in defence of the 800ft tall tower, “it will have to build very large buildings. The decision has to be addressed whether these buildings should happen, or whether they should not and thereby consign London to play a very limited historical, touristic role.”
The son of a civil servant whose father had emigrated from Italy, César Pelli was born on October 12 1926 in the Argentine city of San Miguel de Tucumán. He graduated from Tucumán University in 1949 and remained in the city to work as a director of design for a governmental organisation.
In 1952 he won a scholarship to study at the University of Illinois; though he had intended to stay only nine months, he completed a two-year MSC in Architecture which led to his immediate appointment as associate architect in the firm of Eero Saarinen, son of the eminent architect, Eliel Saarinen.
Pelli later said of the office: “It was an extraordinary place to serve one’s apprenticeship.” Eero Saarinen never imposed any style or philosophy on his associates, who also included Kevin Roche and Robert Venturi, but allowed them freedom to develop their own ideas.
During his time there Pelli was closely involved in the Trans World Flight Center Terminal at John F Kennedy International Airport in New York, and also worked on the Vivian Beaumont Theatre in Manhattan and the Stiles and Morse colleges at Yale, a scheme which caused some controversy due to its use of traditional ornamentation.
Pelli remained with the firm for three
years after Saarinen’s death in 1961. He then moved to Los Angeles to take the post of director of design at Daniel, Mann, Johnson & Mendenhall engineers and architects.
Pelli described the West coast of America as a “cultural vacuum” – a welcome relief from the constant critical pressure he would have encountered from the East Coast architectural establishment. In Los Angeles he was able to experiment freely and became particularly interested in glass cladding, feeling that surface was the most important aspect of modern architecture: “Instead of solid masonry walls of one material from inside to out, one builds a structural skeleton that supports in turn an exterior skin. Instead of an architecture of depth where openings are at a high premium you have an architecture of surface, of colour, patterns and texture”.
With Anthony Lumsden, a former colleague at Eero Saarinen, Pelli used a mirrored glass skin – warped in parts to add interest to the reflections of the suburban surroundings – to clad the 1966 Teledyne Systems Laboratories in Northridge, California. The 17-storey Century City Medical Plaza in Los Angeles (1966) was sheathed in dark grey glass with an unusually small proportion of framing to glass.
Pelli’s last significant design for DMJM was the Comsat Laboratories in Maryland (1967), a hi-tech linear building with a circulation spine set along a high glass and aluminium wall. As with the Teledyne Laboratories, the plan allowed for future growth: Pelli did not seek durability in his buildings but felt instead that architecture should enhance life by accenting “perception, lightness and change”.
In 1968 Pelli joined Gruen Associates of Los Angeles and New York as partner in charge of design. He continued to experiment with cladding systems on such edifices as the Toronto-dominion Bank Tower in Vancouver (1968) and the San Bernadino City Hall (1969), both clad in dark-brown glass, and the Western Electric Building in Newark, New Jersey (1969), where the outer layer is composed of panels rather than a seamless skin.
The 1970 Commons and Courthouse Centre in Columbus, Indiana, was set in a run-down Victorian area of the town and Pelli saw it as his primary mission to restore life to the area with what was effectively an indoor town square. After sunset the glass cladding dissolves to reveal the interior, with its playground, shops and galleries. Though it was a success in terms of attracting crowds, Pelli failed to integrate the building architecturally with its surroundings and critics found the geometry and materials at odds with the Victorian context.
The 1971 Pacific Design Center, a landmark in Los Angeles known as the “Blue Whale” for its blue ceramic glass exterior and massiveness, also aroused controversy over its lack of consideration for the surroundings, largely made up of small-scale housing. It is crowned with a glazed barrel vault and contains a spectacular lift shaft suspended within a cylindrical void. Typically, Pelli played with the angles of the glass to distort the reflections.
Pelli was restricted in the amount of glass he was allowed to use in his design for the US Embassy in Tokyo due to earthquake safety codes. He nevertheless created an elegant structure by sheathing the concrete in a thin layer of anodised aluminium. The windows were of mirrored glass and the ends were left exposed.
In 1977 Pelli left Los Angeles to become Dean of the School of Architecture at Yale. He launched his own practice and immediately received several commissions, mostly for high-rise buildings. He departed from his earlier style, showing greater concern for context, He also rejected the “glass box” of the International style and experimented with such older features as sculpted tops and ornamental spires: “What I am trying for,” he commented, “is to capture the richness of past forms by exploiting the technology of the present.”
The much sought-after commission to design the gallery extension and block of flats for the Museum of Modern Art in New York (1977-84) forced Pelli into the limelight. The project was beset with problems and conflicts of interest, including arguments among the department curators, who were vying with each other for more space.
The extension was covered in grey glass, patterned to relate to the horizontal lines of the original 1938 stone building, as well as to the residential tower, which Pelli sheathed in a Mondrian-inspired pattern of 11 shades of brown and grey to blend into the cityscape.
The commission to design the World Financial Centre in Battery Park, New York (1981-87) was the first of several from the developer Olympia and York. The dimensions of the setbacks and shafts of its towers, faced in grey granite with copper-covered roofs, and colonnaded at the base, related to the World Trade Center towers and to other neighbouring buildings.
Pelli left Yale in 1984 in order to practise full-time. He kept his office relatively small – the construction drawings were done by other practices – and the critical part of the designs was always carried out by Pelli himself. A great believer in models as design tools, he kept them in a row on a shelf – like a row of hats, as one observer commented.
Of his later designs, he is best known for the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, which was the world’s highest building when it opened in 1998 and remains the tallest twin-tower structure. Reflecting the prominence of Islam in the life of Malaysia, Pelli designed the steel and glass facade with a nod to motifs found in Islamic art, while the towers’ cross section is based on the Rub el Hizb symbol, consisting of overlapping squares.
Pelli’s awards include First Prize in the 1969 United Nations City Competition and the 1978 Arnold W Brunner Prize. He was a fellow of the American Institute of Architects and became a US citizen in 1964.
Tactful and unpretentious, Cesar Pelli married, in 1950, Diana Balmori, a history and landscape architecture teacher who became his in-house landscape designer. She died in 2016, and he is survived by their two sons, one of whom, Rafael, joined him in his architectural practice.
César Pelli, born October 12 1926, died July 19 2019