Cesar Pelli, designer of iconic buildings around the world, dies at 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 glass-roofed 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.

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; the International Finance Centre in Hong Kong; the Wells Fargo tower in Minneapolis; the UniCredit Tower in Milan; the Torre Banco Macro in Buenos Aires; and the Goldman Sachs tower in Jersey City, New Jersey among many others.

He won hundreds of architecture awards, including the 1995 gold medal of the American Institute of Architects, its highest honor.

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 MoMA 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 Finnish-American architect then working in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. 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 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 whose aegis 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 MoMA commission. By the time MoMA 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.”