Having designed significant buildings around the world, Cesar Pelli has established himself as one of the most important architects practicing in America today, with important buildings spanning four decades. In 1991 the American Institute of Architects (AIA) selected him as one of the ten most influential living American architects, and in 1995 it awarded him the AIA Gold Medal. Pelli has clearly articulated his views on the skyscraper as a building type. This attitude is based on a clear desire, inherited from the legacy of Louis Sullivan, to integrate solutions for the technical problems of core, structure, skin, and mechanical systems with the creation of an appropriate expression and identity for a tall building in an urban context. Pelli’s own writings on the skyscraper demonstrate clearly that, for him, the most fundamental issue is the development of clear identity and urban image for what is otherwise a large box of anonymous space.

Examples of Pelli’s investigation of the tower form can best be seen in the Bank of America Corporate Center (1992; originally the Nations Bank Corporate Center) in Charlotte, North Carolina, and the Carnegie Hall Tower (1991) in New York City. Both exemplify the designer’s careful assimilation of precedent and are less diagrammatic than earlier examples, such as the Four Leaf/Four Oaks Towers (1982) in Houston, Texas.

The Bank of America tower can be regarded as a “pure skyscraper” for two reasons: its iconic verticality, marking the historic center of a revitalized downtown, and its clear tripartite division into base, shaft, and a crowning capital that recalls Sullivan’s skyscrapers as well as 1920s and 1930s precedents. The Carnegie Hall Tower also acknowledges history by its contextualization, making the 60- story high-rise a fitting neighbor to the historic Carnegie Hall auditorium. In both instances, Pelli’s architecture is characterized by a search for an appropriate and distinctive formal expression that is at the same time responsive to history and context. In the twin 85-story Petronas Towers (1996) in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, this appreciation for context extends beyond purely architectural and urban matters and into broader cultural realms. The twin towers, with their sleek cladding and distinctive profiles, define a monumental urban gateway, whereas the correspondingly complex shapes of the office floor plans—two rotated and superimposed squares with small circular in-fills—were developed to relate to Islamic geometric principles.

Pelli’s tenure in Eero Saarinen’s office (1954–64) offered him firsthand experience of Saarinen’s free interpretation of the relationship between architecture, function, and expression. This search for an architectural language for urban towers dovetails neatly with a concern that has dominated Pelli’s architecture for decades, regardless of building type: the technical construction and visual expression of the building’s skin.

The development of this interest in the building envelope can be charted through the 1970s and 1980s, when Pelli’s work featured exquisitely detailed glass curtain walls that pushed that modernist technology to its poetic aesthetic ends, exemplified by buildings such as San Bernardino City Hall (1972); The Commons (1973) at Columbus, Indiana; and the Pacific Design Center (Phase I 1975, Phase II 1988) in Los Angeles. Midway through the 1980s and continuing through the 1990s, Pelli rediscovered the relevance of masonry construction. Instead of the sleek, homogeneous, fragile, and transparent curtain walls of glass and other lightweight panels that had become his hallmark, Pelli’s interests expanded to explore the contrasting aesthetics of opacity, orchestrated pattern, and heaviness without mass.

In buildings such as Herring Hall (1984) at Rice University in Houston; the Mathematics, Computing, and Engineering Center (1991) at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut; and the Boyer Center for Molecular Medicine (1991, New Haven, Connecticut) at Yale, Pelli’s interest focused deliberately on a reinterpretation of the traditional masonry building envelope, transforming it from its historic origins of thick, load-bearing brick and stone into thinner skins or layers of nonstructural enclosure supported off the structural frame. An increasingly bright palette of colors invites comparison to the theories of Victorian critic John Ruskin concerning “constructed polychromy” and the work of High Victorian architects in England such as William Butterfield. Pelli’s design for the Hakata Bay Oriental Hotel and Resort (1995) in Japan melds together three decades of exploration regarding the building envelope, with the curved 35-story hotel tower formed of alternating bands of tautly stretched glass and brick-colored tiles rising through a four-story plinth of assertively patterned and colored tile and masonry.

Pelli’s buildings span the difficult cultural transition from modernism to Postmodernism, and the tensions implicit in this major shift of attitudes, ideologies, and aesthetics are apparent in much of his work. A crucial concern expressed by Pelli when discussing his own work is the relationship between a building’s image and its social and constructional reality, and the attempted resolution of this three-part equation is at the heart of Pelli’s search for authentic expression. The quality of Pelli’s architecture resides not in the modernist heroics of plan form or in the witty historical allusions of Postmodern eclecticism but in a scrupulous attention to appropriateness—of siting, material, and building detail.

DAVID WALTERS

Sennott R.S. Encyclopedia of twentieth century architecture, Vol.3. Fitzroy Dearborn., 2005.  

1926 Born in Tucumán, Argentina, 12 October;

1944-49 Educated at University of Tucumán;

1949 Diploma of Architecture, University of Tucumán;

1950 Married Diana Balmori;

1950-52 Director of Design, OFEMPE (government organization for subsidized housing), Tucumán;

1952 Immigrated to the United States;

1952-54 Studied at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign;

1954 Master’s in Architecture, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign;

1954-64 Associate Architect, Eero Saarinen and Associates, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, and Hamden, Connecticut;

1960 Visiting Professor, University of Tucumán;

1960 Visiting Professor, University of Córdoba, Argentina;

1964-68 Director of Design, DMJM (Daniel, Mann, Johnson, and Mendenhall), Los Angeles;

1964 Naturalized U.S. citizen;

1968-77 Partner in charge of Design, Gruen Associates, Los Angeles;

1972 Charlotte Davenport Visiting Professor, Yale University School of Architecture;

1974 William Henry Bishop Visiting Professor, Yale University School of Architecture;

1975-76 Visiting Professor, University of California at Los Angeles;

1977 Principal of Cesar Pelli and Associates, New Haven, Connecticut;

1977-84 Dean of School of Architecture, Yale University;

1978 Arnold W. Brunner Memorial Prize, National Institute of Arts and Letters;

1980 Elected Fellow, American Institute of Architects;

1982 Elected Academician, American Academy of Arts and Letters;

1987 National Academy of Design Associate;

1989 Most Outstanding Firm Award, American Institute of Architects;

1990 Honorary Doctorate, Pratt Institute, New York;

1990 Honorary Doctorate, University of New Haven, New Haven, Connecticut;

1995 American Institute of Architects Gold Medal;

1996 Honorary Doctorate, Roger Williams University, Bristol, Rhode Island;

1997 Member of L’Academie d’Architecture de France;

1998 Honorary Doctorate, Universidad de Belgrano, Argentina;

1999 Honorary Doctorate, Universidad Empresarial Siglo 21, Argentina;

2000 Honorary Doctorate, Connecticut College, New London, Connecticut;

July 19, 2019 Died at his home in New Haven, Connecticut.

Selected Publications

“Skyscrapers,” Perspecta: The Yale Architectural Journal (1982)

“Architectural Form and the Tradition of Building,” Tokyo: A+U extra edition (July 1985)

“Pieces of the City,” Architectural Digest (August 1988)

“Four Buildings Responsive to their Critical Surroundings,” Tokyo: A+U (January 1993)

Observations for Young Architects, New York: Monacelli, 1999

Further Reading

Cesar Pelli: Selected and Current Works, Mulgrave, Victoria: Images, 1993

Crosbie, Michael J., Cesar Pelli: Recent Themes, Basel and Boston: Birkhäuser, 1998

Gray, Lee Edward, Pattern and Context: Essays on Cesar Pelli, Charlotte: University of North Carolina, 1992

Futagawa, Yukio (editor), The Commons and Courthouse Center, Indiana, 1971–74; Pacific Design Center, Los Angeles, California, 1972–76; Rainbow Mall and Winter Garden, Niagara Falls, New York, 1975–77, Tokyo: A.D.A. Tokyo, 1981

World Architecture Review (1998) (special issue on Cesar Pelli)

MORE BOOKS