TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/092490/0924430.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 7.7 KB | 173 lines

                                                                                DESIGN, Page 98

Big Yet Still Beautiful


In today's cityscapes, Cesar Pelli's buildings are like dancers
among thugs

By KURT ANDERSEN


    Cesar Pelli lives and practices architecture in New Haven,
Conn., for him the perfect distance from Manhattan: close
enough to visit for an afternoon, far enough to experience the
New Yorkophile's delight each time he plunges into the city.
"Coming down Broadway," Pelli recalls of a recent visit, "I
suddenly noticed this burst of golden light up ahead." He
smiles his sheepish, civilized grin. "It was this building of
mine." Pelli, 64, has designed some of the worthiest large
buildings of the past few years: the humpback blue glass Pacific
Design Center in West Hollywood; Wall Street's vast, handsome
World Financial Center; the romantic 1930ish Norwest Center in
Minneapolis -- each one urbane and appealing and unlike the
others. But this new building, this burst of golden light in
midtown Manhattan, is Pelli's best work yet. Indeed, Carnegie
Hall Tower, officially finished last week, is the finest
high-rise to go up in New York City in a generation.

    The feat is all the more salutary given the building's
horribly overbuilt location: just 25 ft. east stands
Metropolitan Tower, a grim, 66-story black glass trapezoid
finished in 1986 (only the two-story Russian Tea Room separates
the two buildings), and less than a block south is architect
Helmut Jahn's new 70-story Cityspire. Yet instead of adding to
the high-rise pile-on, Carnegie Hall Tower improves the
neighborhood and the skyline -- in part by visually eclipsing
Metropolitan Tower -- and proves that grandeur need not equal
bulk. Pelli's apartment-and-office tower is a full block deep
and 60 stories tall, but it is marvelously narrow -- a mere 50
ft. wide. New buildings of this height usually contain two or
three times as much square footage; no matter how interesting
or tarted up, such behemoths almost inevitably darken and
oppress their bit of the city. This slender, elegant slab is
like a dancer among thugs.

    The unusual difficulties Pelli faced -- squeezed site,
Carnegie Hall as partner and next-door neighbor -- are what
have made the new tower so special and grand. "Constraints,"
the architect says, "are not necessarily negative. They force
you to try avenues you would have ignored." Contextualism has
been the urban-design buzz word of the past decade, but no
architect has done a better job of fitting a big building into
such an important, tightly woven urban fabric. The
535,000-sq.-ft. tower is technically an addition to Carnegie
Hall and takes important aesthetic cues from it.

    The hall's century-old Roman brick and terra cotta are
suggested on the tower by a skin of brownish and amber brick
in five shades, and the molding and cornice lines of Carnegie's
beaux arts facade are continued across the front of Pelli's
building. The high-rise is wrapped by thick metal bands at
six-floor intervals corresponding to the older building's
height.

    Pelli, however, did not make the standard postmodern mistake
of replicating an old form at inappropriately huge size. The
interior spaces are modest (no more than about 14,000 sq. ft.
per floor), and an intricately detailed exterior suggests a
bygone age, not any particular building or style. Four metal
grids, each bolted at an upswept angle to the 60th floor,
provide a classically inspired, yet unequivocally modern top.
"We picked up threads of the past," says Pelli, "with a
contemporary technology and contemporary sensibility."

    Pelli started picking up threads of the past only in his
work of the past decade or so. Born and raised in Argentina,
he moved to the U.S. in the 1950s and went to work for Eero
Saarinen, the great unorthodox modernist. By the 1970s, Pelli
was a well-known partner in a large Los Angeles firm, just
beginning the transformation of his work from glassy high tech
to highly textured, more or less old-fashioned forms. Even as
a modernist, he had never used the international style as an
excuse for creating bland, by-the-book monoliths; the electric
blue Pacific Design Center (1975) was a devilish, virtuoso
stroke.

    Then in 1977, at age 50, his life was suddenly transformed.
He was named dean of Yale's architecture school and awarded one
of the most coveted commissions of the year: to renovate New
York City's Museum of Modern Art and design a 56-story
apartment tower next door. "I came east without a [design] job,
without connections, without a client, nothing. My intention
was to be a teacher -- and maybe do kitchen additions. A month
after I started as dean, I got a call about MOMA." He brought
in his former colleague Fred Clarke to help, and the calls kept
coming.

    Pelli (who left Yale in 1984) and Clarke now oversee 73
architects working on projects ranging from the relatively
small (an addition to the Institute for Advanced Study in
Princeton) to the enormous (an office-retail complex on Canary
Wharf in London, a new main terminal for Washington's National
Airport). As it turned out, Pelli says, "I never did kitchen
additions."

    Time and again, Pelli has proved, as he puts it, that "you
can do buildings that have the psychological effects of
traditional buildings without having to use the whole
traditional paraphernalia. You can use modern technology but
still give that richness of feeling."

    Pelli's brilliance at making a building fit into a
particular block, a particular city -- his sensitivity to
context -- may be his one weakness as an architect. When he
designs for a site without any strong local style or urban
patterns, he can seem at sea. For instance, his design for a
new office building on South Figueroa in Los Angeles proposes
a white, bowed-front tower with three shallow setbacks and a
flat top, twice the bulk of Carnegie Hall Tower and, judging
from a model, nothing special.

    But then, one of Pelli's virtues is his humility. "I don't
feel I'm building masterpieces," he says. "If a building is a
masterpiece, that happens after the fact." In a profession
where, at Pelli's level, egomaniacal bluster is often part of
the act, his craftsman-like long view is a pleasure. He goes
out of his way to demystify his job, partly by designing with
scale models all along the way. Most architects stick to
drawings, which untrained eyes have a hard time imagining in
three dimensions. Pelli goes so far as to give clients an
explicit Column A-Column B choice. Late this summer, for
example, when Vassar College President Frances Daly Fergusson
came to look at Pelli's design for a new college art gallery,
the architect had laid out several very different models of the
gallery reception area; she simply chose her favorite. "I like
to make design understandable to the clients," the architect
says. "It comes from the belief that there is no perfect
solution. There are several good solutions." Among serious
architects, that verges on heresy.

    Pelli still gets thank-yous from strangers about his MOMA
renovation and notes from Minneapolis praising his Norwest
Center. Ordinary people instinctively understand his talent.
Remarkably, his very big buildings are thoughtful, likable,
rich in detail, humane. "If the architecture is very good," he
says, "huge scale can be a vehicle for doing an exceptional
building." Coming from almost anyone else, that would be
disingenuous tripe. When Pelli delivers platitudes about making
cities better -- "In a good city every building should be a
gift" -- one tends to accept the earnestness. His work has
earned it.