This interview with Cesar Pelli is the second in a series of posts based on an exhibition that I co-curated at SCI-Arc in 2005. Previously I posted an interview with Ray Kappe.
I conducted this interview with Cesar Pelli by phone in the summer of 2005. In a few weeks, I will post conversations with LA architects Koning Eizenberg, originally from Melbourne, and Anthony Lumsden, originally from Sydney.
Pelli is most well known in LA as the designer of West Hollywood’s Pacific Design Center, anchored by the iconic Big Blue Whale building at the intersection of Melrose and Robertson in West Hollywood.
He arrived in LA in 1964 after working for a decade with Eero Saarinen. Under Saarinen, he worked on the TWA Terminal at JFK International Airport. In LA, he became the director of design at Daniel, Mann, Johnson, and Mendenhall, the predecessor of multinational engineering company AECOM, where he worked closely with Lumsden. One early DMJM project by Pelli and Lumsden that you may know is the Century City Medical Plaza, designed in a late Miesian style, minus the exposed or expressed vertical structure.
In 1968 Pelli became a partner for design at Victor Gruen Associates in Los Angeles. At Gruen, Pelli worked closely with James Lim and Norma Merrick Sklarek, Gruen’s director and the first African American woman in the United States to become a licensed architect.
Before departing for the East Coast to become the Dean at the Yale School of Architecture in 1977, he designed a few other lesser-known but equally taut, glass-skinned buildings in Southern California, including the San Bernadino City Hall.
Cesar Pelli
On Architecture and Teaching
What was practicing and teaching architecture like in LA when you were here?
Cesar Pelli (CP): You could start the period with the opening of the School of Architecture at UCLA. Not too long thereafter, Ray Kappe founded SCI-Arc.
Those were small and tentative starts. But they had a large effect on the architectural world of LA. Instead of having only USC teaching architecture in the City now, we had three centers, and the new ones were very dynamic. We are still seeing the effect of these new schools and the impact they had in the city and in the role of architecture in LA. That is easy to document. CalArts and Pomona were earlier, but I think the new dynamic starts [were] in the city itself.
At the same time, the larger architectural firms—the one I am most familiar with is DMJM, of course—started to get much more concerned with design. Suddenly large-scaled projects that had never been designed with any critical eye were now being designed in much more innovative ways.
This was new for LA because up until that period, what we had of architectural significance in LA was primarily domestic architecture - Neutra, Schindler, Craig Ellwood, the Case Study houses. The larger firms were not that interested in design- with the exception of Bill Pereira, but with Bill, it was hit and miss. When we [Lumsden and Pelli] arrived at DMJM, even Bill Pereira got very concerned and started engaging bright designers to work with him.
The other large firms also had to react.
LA then and Now.
How would you compare Los Angeles then and now?
CP: I arrived in LA in June 1964. When I first arrived in LA, if you wanted to listen to music, you had to go to the Masonic temple. But soon thereafter, the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion was open, and you could listen to music in a place designed for it. The first art museums also opened, LACMA and in Pasadena, that was a period of time when LA was coming of age in all the arts.
There was an important exhibition staged at LACMA at around 1970, Art of the 60s. There is a great picture with a bunch of artists like Ed Ruscha, Kienholz. Frank Gehry and I, we were the only architects in the group photo. [The] most spectacular thing was two models with Rudi Gernreich's minimum clothes on.
These things didn't exist in LA before, but suddenly, art started to bloom and multiply at a much different rate than it had before. It was a moment when LA was coming of age culturally. It was more than just architecture. It was happening in all areas.
Being an Architect in LA
What was working in LA like in those days?
CP: We were working in a rather isolated environment.
Which, in many ways, was stimulating because we were not running into entrenched ideas. People were not supportive, but they were open.
When we presented the San Bernardino Town Hall, the Councilmen just looked and approved it. They didn't think much of it. This had its pros and its cons. There was no architectural discourse, and there was not much architectural interest—on at least a large part of the public. But at that time, I was charged with ideas after having worked for Eero Saarinen’s office for ten years, so I think I could have drawn on that charge for some time.
There was also new interest—I was asked to teach at UCLA, and we organized a discussion group with Tim Vreeland. Many people from London were arriving—Reyner Banham was there and Archigram, Warren Chalk and Ron Herron. There was a great interest in LA—in particular from England—almost bypassing New York from Europe.
LA Now
What do you think of LA today?
CP: When I moved to LA, it was a different country, different from the rest of America with a peculiar attraction; it was so fresh, so undeveloped.
That has changed completely. The idea of LA has become seamlessly woven into the rest of America.
Anything that Frank [Gehry] or Eric [Moss] or Thom [Mayne] do gets immediately published, so we know what they are doing and what they are thinking. The ideas that show up at SCI-Arc or UCLA show up elsewhere.
LA has become one of many cities competing for information, ascendancy, and influence. It competes not only with New York or Chicago but also with London, Paris, and Tokyo.
Globalization has engulfed architecture faster and deeper than other activities because many other businesses remain locally tied. But not architecture, as you know, all of the architects of some note in LA have work somewhere else.
For further reading and listening: Cesar Pelli, Obituary with Frances Anderton and architectural historian Daniel Paul.