Cesar Pelli, who lived and worked in New Haven, Connecticut, USA, had many distinctive works and was known for his innovations with glass, and he spent much of his career trying to reconcile modernism with his interest in shape, texture and the architecture of the past. He won hundreds of awards, including the American Institute of Architects’ 1995 gold medal, and served as dean of Yale’s School of Architecture from 1977 to 1984.
His biggest successes came later in life. Mr. Pelli did not open his own firm until he was 50, and even then, he said, “It was only because I was forced to.”
In 1977, he was chosen to design the renovation and expansion of the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan, seizing the moment to found the firm, Cesar Pelli & Associates Architects, with his wife, the Spanish-born and landscape architect Diana Balmori, and a former colleague, Fred Clarke. The firm grew, eventually becoming Pelli Clarke Pelli Architects in 2005, with his son Rafael as a named partner.
César Pelli was born on Oct. 12, 1926, in San Miguel de Tucumán, a small city in northern Argentina where his mother was a teacher and his father a civil servant reduced by the Depression to doing odd jobs to make ends meet.
He study architecture at the National University of Tucumán only because it combined two of his favorite subjects, history and art.
In 1952, he moved to the University of Illinois to continue his architecture training. He said he had no money, and no plans to remain in the United States after his nine-month fellowship expired. He was married by then to Ms. Balmori, whom he met in college, and she was pregnant.
Ambrose Richardson has been one of Pelli’s professors and recommended him to Eero Saarinen, the Finnish-American architect then working in Bloomfield Hills, Mich. Cesar Pelli was working 10 years at the Saarinen firm, where one of his projects was the TWA Flight Center in Kennedy Airport, which is now the TWA Hotel.
During the 1960s, he moved California. In 1968, he took a job in Los Angeles-based Gruen Associates, where he participated on one of his best-known projects, the Pacific Design Center. “A very ugly building type, which is showrooms, which are normally brick boxes,” and “turned it into something joyful” said Pelli.
In 1977, Pelli was selected as the dean of Yale’s school of architecture, where he had occasionally taught.
He had barely settled in when he won the MoMA competition. Pelli attributed his selection in part to the museum’s financial constraints, which led the search committee to choose an architect with strong practical skills. By the time MoMA opened in 1984, the Pelli firm was at work on a number of prominent projects, including what is now Brookfield Place.
The firm’s most monumental work — the Petronas complex in Malaysia’s capital — is a pair of 88-story towers linked by a skybridge about 500 feet off the ground. The bridge has a practical purpose, but Pelli said his goal was aesthetic: The bridge and the towers’ upper floors form a kind of gate suggesting a portal to a higher world. The towers themselves were the world’s tallest buildings from 1998 until 2004.
Pelli never apologized for designing buildings that satisfied their owners rather than challenging them. Architects, he wrote, “must produce what is needed of us. This is not a weakness in our discipline, but a source of strength.”
Pelli and Ms. Balmori often collaborated professionally, including on the Winter Garden Atrium. They had two sons, Rafael, the architect, and Denis, who is a professor of psychology and neural science at New York University. They survive him. Ms. Balmori died in 2016.
Other notable Pelli projects include the International Finance Center in Hong Kong; Francis Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College; the United States Embassy in Tokyo; and Carnegie Hall Tower in New York.
César Pelli was born on Oct. 12, 1926, in San Miguel de Tucumán, a small city in northern Argentina where his mother was a teacher and his father a civil servant reduced by the Depression to doing odd jobs to make ends meet.
He study architecture at the National University of Tucumán only because it combined two of his favorite subjects, history and art.
In 1952, he moved to the University of Illinois to continue his architecture training. He said he had no money, and no plans to remain in the United States after his nine-month fellowship expired. He was married by then to Ms. Balmori, whom he met in college, and she was pregnant.
Ambrose Richardson has been one of Pelli’s professors and recommended him to Eero Saarinen, the Finnish-American architect then working in Bloomfield Hills, Mich. Cesar Pelli was working 10 years at the Saarinen firm, where one of his projects was the TWA Flight Center in Kennedy Airport, which is now the TWA Hotel.
During the 1960s, he moved California. In 1968, he took a job in Los Angeles-based Gruen Associates, where he participated on one of his best-known projects, the Pacific Design Center. “A very ugly building type, which is showrooms, which are normally brick boxes,” and “turned it into something joyful” said Pelli.
In 1977, Pelli was selected as the dean of Yale’s school of architecture, where he had occasionally taught.
He had barely settled in when he won the MoMA competition. Pelli attributed his selection in part to the museum’s financial constraints, which led the search committee to choose an architect with strong practical skills. By the time MoMA opened in 1984, the Pelli firm was at work on a number of prominent projects, including what is now Brookfield Place.
The firm’s most monumental work — the Petronas complex in Malaysia’s capital — is a pair of 88-story towers linked by a skybridge about 500 feet off the ground. The bridge has a practical purpose, but Pelli said his goal was aesthetic: The bridge and the towers’ upper floors form a kind of gate suggesting a portal to a higher world. The towers themselves were the world’s tallest buildings from 1998 until 2004.
Pelli never apologized for designing buildings that satisfied their owners rather than challenging them. Architects, he wrote, “must produce what is needed of us. This is not a weakness in our discipline, but a source of strength.”
Pelli and Ms. Balmori often collaborated professionally, including on the Winter Garden Atrium. They had two sons, Rafael, the architect, and Denis, who is a professor of psychology and neural science at New York University. They survive him. Ms. Balmori died in 2016.
Other notable Pelli projects include the International Finance Center in Hong Kong; Francis Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College; the United States Embassy in Tokyo; and Carnegie Hall Tower in New York.
