The New York Times tribute to Caesar Pelli after his death

In a long article published by the New York Times, the prestigious architect Fred A. Bernstein and the renowned architecture critic Paul Goldberger signed together a memo in which they recalled the life and work of the artist. Argentinian Cesar Pelli, who died Friday at the age of 75. 92 years old.

Some paragraphs of this note are:

• Mr. Pelli's work included all of the towers that make up the World Financial Center (now called Brookfield Place) at Battery Park City in New York City, famous for its winter garden topped with a glbad roof, the Pacific Design Center in Los Angeles, known for its bright blue glbad facade, and the Ronald Reagan National Airport on the outskirts of Washington. "

• "Although his work has been considerable, he has designed the US Embbady in Tokyo, the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts in Miami, and the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center in Vbadar. Among other projects, Mr. Pelli was particularly known for his Petronas Twin Towers in Malaysia were the tallest buildings in the world from 1998 to 2004. Other Pelli towers, though it was not. registrars, dominated the horizons of cities around the world.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 financial center Hong Kong International Airport, the Wells Fargo Tower in Minneapolis, the UniCredit Tower in Milan, the Macro Banking Tower in Buenos Aires and the Goldman Sachs Tower in Jersey City, among others. "

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• "He has won hundreds of architectural awards, including the Gold Medal of the American Institute of Architects in 1995, his highest honor." Mr. Pelli's success was late, he did not open his own business until the age of 50. Even then, he said: "Only because I was forced, it happened in 1977, when he was chosen to design the renovation and expansion of the Museum of Modern Art of Manhattan. "

• "With his wife, landscape architect Diana Balmori, and a former colleague, Fred Clarke, have trained architects Cesar Pelli & Associates to manage the MoMA project, the company has grown and eventually became the architects Pelli Clarke Pelli, the second is his son Rafael, who was working outside an office in Manhattan, while Messrs. Pelli and Clarke headed the New Haven office created by Mr. Pelli in 1977 in a modest two-story building across the street from the Yale School of Architecture, where he served as Dean. "

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• "It was an unattractive place for a company that would become one of the most prolific skyscraper designers in the world, and stayed with Mr. Pelli until his death."

• "Although Mr. Pelli's office flourished, the MoMA building did not do it and was completed in 1984, part was demolished in 2002 so that the museum could replace it with a larger structure from Japanese architect Yoshio Taniguchi, Pelli said that it was not wrong to see part of his building disappear, which he understood as being motivated by changes in the mission's mission. museum: "Life is full of surprises," said Mr. Pelli, adding that he benefited more than his share of In fact, he considered that his entire career was unlikely. "

• "Caesar Pelli was born on October 12, 1926 in San Miguel de Tucumán, a small town in northern Argentina, where, he says, there was no architecture to talk about (his mother was a teacher, his father an official He decided to study architecture because he combined two of his favorite subjects, history and art, but he could risk architecture only because his parents had started two years earlier (at age 5 instead of age 7), because he was much younger than his clbadmates, Mr. Pelli recalled: "I do not have a girlfriend and I have never been elected to the teams "But in college", I felt that I could choose the architecture, which was a lark, because I had two more years to play " , did he declare.

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• "In 1952 he came to the north to pursue his training in architecture at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign." At that time, he had no money or planned to stay in the United States after his nine-month fellowship expired. To complicate matters, his wife, Ms. Balmori, whom she met while she was a teenager in Argentina and who was with him in Illinois, discovered that she was pregnant. "

• "The couple never went back to Argentina to live there.On the other hand, one of Mr. Pelli's teachers, Ambrose Richardson, recommended him to Eero Saarinen, the great Finnish-American architect who worked in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, spent nearly 10 years at Saarinen, and his projects included the TWA control center at Kennedy Airport. had reminded him, Mr. Saarinen was not happy when the structural engineers had informed him that the two columns The central offices of the building should cross, forming a giant X. Mr. Saarinen asked Mr. Pelli to try to carve these columns to create something beautiful, which, according to Mr. Pelli's narrative, led to the famous winged gull building ".

• "Later, Mr. Saellien commissioned Mr. Pelli to work at two new residential universities in Yale, which were built on a tight budget." Mr. Saarinen has developed a plan for using concrete walls reinforced with large exposed stones. , an economical way to evoke Yale's oldest masonry buildings When Mr. Saarinen died in 1961, Mr. Pelli continued to work on what would become Ezra Stiles College and Morse College, considered examples of the modernism genre "

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• Jayne Merkel, biographer of Saarinen, said that Mr. Pelli was "the real creative right hand man" in the TWA and Yale buildings. "

• "In 1967, Mr. Pelli found a job in California at DMJM, a leading architectural and engineering firm." The company's business customers wanted fast buildings and within budget, and Mr. Pelli enjoyed great freedom. designer, provided that he achieves these objectives ".

• "He became particularly known for his experiments with new forms of glbad facades and designed many buildings covered with various forms of reflective glbad, including colored panel glbad, but glbad skins, which hid virtually everything that was Behind them (but often with beautiful reflections from the sky) were not suitable for all situations, and in his San Bernardino town hall, the glbad wall, he said, was too disagreeable and abstract. " A city hall has to feel comfortable, get closer, he says.

• "Mr. Pelli added that he had taken" a freedom "with the project that he should not have had, unlike" most of my colleagues ", he said. "I do not think architects have the right to experience the needs. people".

• "In 1968, he began working for Gruen Associates, a large Los Angeles-based architectural firm, under whose direction he designed the Pacific Design Center, which he said had taken" a very strong building. ugly, namely exhibition halls, these are usually boxes of bricks "and had" turned into something joyous "by covering it with a brilliant blue crystal.This first building of more than 700 000 square feet, quickly known as the blue whale, then joined a second green glbad building, a last building, made of red glbad, was added some 40 years after the presentation by Mr. Pelli of the original plan of the center for the first time. "

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• "Mr. Pelli said that he was ready to leave Gruen and the architectural practice of the company when, in 1976, he was named Dean of the Yale School of Architecture. " Mr. Pelli moved to New Haven and settled in the famous building of art and architecture designed by Paul Rudolph, intending to adhere to university life, what I wanted to do, was he said, it was teaching and writing books ".

• "Although he eventually wrote" Observations for Young Architects ", a 1999 volume that combines his personal story with his view of the profession, his plans were interrupted when he won the award. the MoMA commission, but Mr. Pelli attributed his selection to the museum because of the financial constraints of the museum, which led the research committee to choose an architect with strong practical skills, the fact that his design center Pacific, recently completed, received a wide and favorable publicity.

• Mr. Pelli in 1995. He did not open his own business before the age of 50, and then "only because I was forced," he said.

• "His project for MoMA has not been a universal success." Critic Carter Horsley compared his interiors, with his notorious escalators, to those of a mall "without much success". But when the MoMA first opened in 1984, Mr. Pelli had received many other requests for the design of large commercial buildings and, while continuing his badociation with Yale and staying in New Haven, he came to to spend more time on major business projects than he had ever had in Los Angeles. "

• Among the company's most memorable buildings are the Petronas Twin Towers, a pair of 88-storey, 1,500-foot high buildings linked by an overhead bridge at approximately 500 feet above ground level, even If the bridge had a function, it offered an additional way of exit for the upper sections of the towers, and Mr. Pelli stated that his objective was aesthetic: the bridge and the upper floors of the towers form a kind of door suggesting in Asian cultures, a portal to a higher world ".

• "Although Mr. Pelli began his career as a confirmed modernist and became famous initially for his creative work on glbad facades, his work has continued to evolve, particularly with respect to the design of skyscrapers. . "

• "Like many architects, he feared that modernism was not expressive enough," he admitted with great admiration for many early skyscrapers and wondered how he could incorporate some of his emotions into his work without being too much of a mimic. In the 1980s, he tried to find a common ground by giving his towers different types of roofs and exteriors built mainly of stone at their base and moved to more glbad as they were built. they stood up, as if they said they had their roots in the past and their summits in the present.However, in a few years they were heading more directly towards the use of the historical form. (now Wells Fargo) in Minneapolis has an obvious debt to Rockefeller Plaza, the centerpiece of the Rockefeller Center in New York. "

• His Carnegie Hall tower draws heavily on the concert hall in which he was, technically, an addition, reproducing his color and many details. Later, however, in buildings such as Goldman Sachs in Jersey City and Salesforce Tower in San Francisco, Mr. Pelli developed a curved tower shape that seemed to bend gently inward when he encountered the sky, a shape that was coming back to modernism but which has replaced the sharp edges with a sculptural and natural ease His later work will be more and more defined by the slightly curved glbad facades and the determination to find a silent sculptural form, discreet but memorable, which part of a continuing search for alternatives to mid-twentieth century square towers of modernism. "

• "At the same time that Mr. Pelli was looking for the sky, Ms. Balmori stayed closer to the ground, becoming a well-known landscaper, although the couple divorced in 2001 and Ms. Balmori moved to New York, they continued to work together to many projects, 70 years after meeting in Tucumán. "

• "Mr. Pelli and Ms. Balmori have two children: the architect Rafael and Denis, a professor of neurology and psychology at the University of New York, who survives him, as well as two grandchildren." He died in 2016.

• Mr. Pelli has never apologized for designing buildings that satisfy rather than challenge their owners. Architects, he wrote, "must produce what we need." This is not a weakness of our discipline, but a source of strength.