Cesar Pelli
From Philosopedia
Pelli, Cesar (12 October 1926– )
Pelli, the architect born in Argentina but who became an American citizen, has an international reputation and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Named one of the top ten of living American architects, he was dean of Yale’s School of Architecture (1977–1984. His works include the Pacific Design Center in Los Angeles; the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo; the Museum of Modern Art in New York City; the Expansion and Residential Tower of New York City’s World Financial Center; New York’s Carnegie Hall Tower; Plaza Tower in Costa Mesa, California; Docklands Light Railway Station in London; and the New Main Terminal at Washington National Airport. He had the Kuala Lumpur commission to build the tallest two towers in the world, the Petronas Towers 1 and 2, which were are 1,483 feet or 88 stories each.
His first "sacred" building, a Catholic church at St. John’s University in New York, was designed as “a distillation of visiting thousands of churches. It was, however, in line with directives of the Second Vatican Council, he told reporter David W. Dunlap (The New York Times, 31 October 1999). “From a philosophical point of view, I’m very much in sympathy with those views,” he explained, saying they include “democratic views of what a church should be.” Worshipers facing the altar see a slice of sky, framed by the cross. “We want people to see the sky and sense that nature is where we are; that this is God’s world.”
Whether Pelli is as much a freethinker as Frank Lloyd Wright, who also designed churches, is unclear. In 1992, asked about Warren Allen Smith's 1950s categories of seven humanisms, Pelli wrote,
- Secular Humanism defines our moment, but all its other forms continue to affect us.
