Enron tower was just one of architect’s creations
Cesar Pelli, who designed some of the world’s most recognizable buildings, died Friday at his home in New Haven, Conn. He was 92.
Pelli’s works included the cluster of towers making up the World Financial Center (now called Brookfield Place) at Battery Park City in New York, famous for the glassroofed Winter Garden at its center; the Pacific Design Center in Los Angeles, known for its bright blue glass facade; and Ronald Reagan National Airport outside Washington.
Among his vast portfolio of designs are Herring Hall at Rice University, the Enron skyscraper downtown, and University of Houston’s Science and Engineering Research and Classroom Complex. He also designed the Four Leaf Towers and Four Oaks Place on South Post Oak in the Galleria area.
He won hundreds of architecture awards, including the 1995 gold medal of the American Institute of Architects, its highest honor.
“He was a warm and gracious man, a civilizing presence in his life and his work, an architect of great dignity and lively creativity who did as much as anyone in the last generation to evolve the form of the skyscraper,” architecture critic Paul Goldberger tweeted.
Pelli was particularly known for his skyscrapers. His Petronas Twin Towers in Malaysia were the tallest
skyscrapers in the world from 1998 to 2004. He designed the One Canada Square tower at Canary Wharf in London; the Carnegie Hall Tower in New York; the Salesforce Tower, now the tallest building in San Francisco; and the International Finance Centre in Hong Kong.
Pelli didn’t open his own firm until he was 50, and even then, he said, “it was only because I was forced to.” That happened in 1977, when he was chosen to design the renovation and expansion of the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan.
With his wife, landscape architect Diana Balmori, and a former colleague, Fred Clarke, he formed Cesar Pelli & Associates Architects to handle the museum project.
The firm grew, eventually becoming Pelli Clarke Pelli Architects. The second Pelli in the name is his son Rafael, who practiced out of an office in Manhattan while Pelli and Clarke ran the New Haven office that Pelli set up in 1977 across the street from the Yale School of Architecture, where he was then serving as dean. It remained Pelli’s base until his death.
Pelli grew up in San Miguel de Tucumán, Argentina. At the Universidad Nacional de Tucumán, he decided to study architecture because it combined two of his favorite subjects, history and art.
In 1952, he continued his architecture training at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. One of Pelli’s professors, Ambrose Richardson, recommended him to Eero Saarinen, the great FinnishAmerican architect then working in Bloomfield Hills, Mich. Pelli spent almost 10 years at the Saarinen firm.
In 1967, Pelli took a job in California at a giant architecture and engineering firm known as DMJM. He became particularly well known for his experiments with new forms of glass facades, and he designed numerous buildings covered in different forms of reflective glass.
In 1968, he went to work for Gruen Associates, a large Los Angeles-based firm, under which he designed the Pacific Design Center. He said he had taken “a very ugly building type” and had “turned it into something joyful” by covering it in bright blue glass.
Pelli said he had been ready to leave the corporate practice of architecture when, in 1976, he was selected as the dean of Yale’s school of architecture. Pelli moved to New Haven, intending to embrace academic life.
His plans were disrupted when he won the Museum of Modern Art commission. By the time the museum opened, in 1984, Pelli had received numerous other requests to design large commercial buildings, and while he continued his association with Yale, he came to spend more of his time on large corporate projects.
At the same time that Pelli was reaching for the sky, Balmori was staying closer to the ground, becoming a renowned landscape designer. Although the couple divorced in 2001, they continued to collaborate.
Pelli and Balmori had two sons: Rafael, the architect, and Denis, who is a professor of psychology and neural science at New York University. They survive him, as do two grandchildren. Balmori died in 2016.
Pelli never apologized for designing buildings that satisfied, rather than challenged, their owners. Architects, he wrote,
“must produce what is needed of us. This is not a weakness in our discipline, but a source of strength.”