I realize that having a style would be very beneficial for my practice from a marketing standpoint, but I can't do it.
I believe my responsibility as an architect is to design the most appropriate building for the place.
Each place has a distinct culture and function, which for me requires an appropriate answer.
It is a brisk March morning in New Haven, Connecticut. Cesar Pelli, the founder and a senior principal of Pelli Clarke Pelli Architects, leafs through some correspondence as he sits in his small private office, one story up, directly above the front door to the firm, located since it began in 1977 near the corner of Chapel and High Streets. It is just down Chapel from Rudolph Hall, home of the Yale School of Architecture, which Pelli headed as dean for seven years.
The office contains ample evidence of the public prominence of this man and his contributions to the field of architecture. There is a wall in the front office that is lined with several decades’ worth of international magazine covers featuring Pelli and his work. Design award certificates cover other walls, including one for the Gold Medal of the American Institute of Architects, bestowed upon Pelli in 1995, and another citing the practice as the AIA Firm of the Year in 1989. In 1991 Pelli was named one of the ten most influential American architects living. There are models everywhere, a veritable museum of cardboard, wood, and plastic of some of the most recognizable landmarks in architecture over the past half-century-plus: the Petronas Towers, New York’s World Financial Center, the Museum of Modern Art tower, laboratories, skyscrapers, airports, and concert halls by the score.
Pelli emerges, lanky and tall, from his office for our meeting. Dressed neatly and conservatively in black pants, a navy sweater vest, and an open-collar white shirt, he is gracious in his salutation, which is punctuated with a rollicking laugh. He offers to pour us each a cup of coffee. For Pelli, architecture is like breathing. On the cusp of his tenth decade, he comes to the office on a daily basis. He clearly enjoys being there, he enjoys being an architect. Pelli exudes the relaxed yet courtly charm and ease of a man so perfectly suited for his life’s work, his life in architecture.
So, let’s begin.
Cesar Pelli was born on October 12, 1926 and raised in San Miguel de Tucumán, Argentina, capital of Tucumán province in the west of the country. Pelli describes himself as bookish as a child, not particularly athletic or competitive, but the favorite with his parents among his two younger siblings. His mother and father, also from Tucumán, had grown up poor. Pelli seems to be an amalgam of his parents, as he describes them. His mother was one of the first women to graduate from the Universidad Nacional de Tucumán and had a fierce commitment to education as a social benefit, “the key to everything,” as Pelli notes. She became a progressive teacher in the public school system, teaching geography and French. Pelli’s father
Working on Wells Fargo Center was wonderful because of the orange-colored Minnesota stone. It is the color of the city; it is part of the place. Those connections are subliminal, but very important.
This magnificent compendium of Cesar Pelli’s life in architecture offers a unique perspective into this master architect’s contribution to contemporary design and building and his continuing impact on the world’s architectural scene.
