Renown Architect Cesar Pelli, Dead at 92
picture by kingofhiking of Flickr
We have not had an architecture post in some time. This occasion certainly calls for it:
César Pelli, the acclaimed architect who designed some of the world’s most distinct buildings, including the Pacific Design Center in Los Angeles, the Torre de Cristal in Madrid and the Petronas Towers in Malaysia, died on Friday at age 92.
The governor of Pelli’s home province of Tucuman, Argentina, Juan Manzur, confirmed the architect’s death on Twitter.
“With much regret we received the sad news of the death of the great Architect César Pelli,” Manzur tweeted. “I want to extend my condolences to all his family, his friends and his team.”
Pelli studied architecture at the Universidad Nacional de Tucuman and graduated in 1949. Pelli moved with his wife, Spanish landscape architect Diana Balmori, to the United States in 1952, on a scholarship to attend the University of Illinois. He became a U.S. citizen in 1964.
Upon obtaining his degree from Illinois, Pelli began working with Finnish-American architect Eero Saarinen. Together, they designed the famous TWA terminal at New York’s Idlewild airport, now known as John F. Kennedy airport.
In the 1960s, working for the firms DMJM and Gruen Associates California, Pelli began exploring his signature modernist style, crafting sleek, glass and steel skyscrapers. His bright-blue, glass-enclosed Pacific Design Center in Los Angeles, completed in 1975, is one of Pelli’s most iconic designs.
Pelli was asked to serve as dean of the Yale School of Architecture in 1977. That same year, he opened his own firm, César Pelli & Associates, in New Haven, Conn., and received the coveted opportunity to design the expansion of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
His MoMA renovation received mixed reviews, with some critics saying it lacked the ambition and innovation present in Pelli’s other work. After its 1984 completion, architecture critic Paul Goldberger wrote in The New York Times that the building “is not as avant-garde by today’s standards as the 1939 structure was in its time. In fact, it is not avant-garde at all, any more than most of the modern art within the museum.”
Despite the criticism, that design opened the door for Pelli and his firm to take on more high-profile projects shaping the skylines of cities around the globe. The Unicredit Tower in Milan, the One Canada Square in London and the Salesforce Tower in San Francisco are all Pelli designs.
In 1991, Pelli was named one of the 10 most influential living American architects by the American Institute of Architects. In 1995, he won the Gold Medal from the American Institute of Architects.
Considered one of Pelli’s crowning achievements, the Malaysian Petronas Towers were the tallest buildings in the world from 1998 to 2004. The glittering 88-floor, glass-facade structures were designed to evoke motifs from Islamic art.
