Cesar Pelli

The architect of Manhattan's World Financial Center -- and of the world's tallest towers -- discusses ground zero, the future of skyscrapers and how New York's skyline is handsomer than ever.

By Brian Libby

May 1, 2002 | For the last seven months we've been living in an era born from the destruction of buildings; in a way, few professions have been more profoundly affected by Sept. 11 than that of the people who design buildings for a living. Few architects, in turn, have felt a more personal connection to the disasters in New York and Washington than Cesar Pelli.

Pelli designed the World Financial Center complex in downtown Manhattan, a collection of foothills intended to soften and humanize the monolithic World Trade Center nearby. The four buildings, nearly 15 years old now, make up what critics have called the best urban space created in New York since Rockefeller Center. Now that the Trade Center is gone, the World Financial Center faces a future in a way Pelli never intended: on its own.

And there are other buildings for Pelli to keep an eye on: Completed just four years ago, his Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, are now the world's tallest -- a title once held by the World Trade Center. He downplays any threats to their safety.

Born and raised in Argentina, Pelli got his start in the office of famed architect Eero Saarinen, working on such midcentury modernist classics as the TWA Terminal Building at New York's JFK Airport, and Morse and Stiles Colleges at Yale University. Pelli later served as dean of Yale's School of Architecture, and wrote the book "Observations for Young Architects."

Perhaps Pelli's greatest lesson has been his boundless passion for his work, which has kept him busy well into his 70s. He is the embodiment of Frank Lloyd Wright's assertion that all fine architectural values are human values. As we decide exactly what should rise from ground zero -- officials in New York recently announced they had accelerated the timetable for developing the World Trade Center site after criticism that the process was moving too slowly -- voices like Pelli's are all the more important. Salon recently spoke to Pelli by phone.

Where were you on the morning of Sept. 11?

I was in Washington, D.C. I had given a lecture the evening before at the National Building Museum, because there was an exhibition of my work scheduled. That morning when I was having breakfast a young lady came in with a very pale face and said, "Have you seen the TV? They have bombed the World Trade Center." So immediately I ran to the TV in my room. Unfortunately, I caught the second plane hitting the tower and both buildings collapsing, feeling total horror and disbelief.

Were you thinking of the buildings at a moment like that?

All I could think about was those images of people jumping from the upper floors. I knew that over 50,000 people worked in the World Trade Center, so I was watching this and imagining the many thousands of people that must be dying. At a time like that I was reminded how architecture is very unimportant compared to human life. There's no way I can understand in the slightest the state of mind that would possess people to do something so evil and on top of that to immolate themselves. How can man be so twisted?

What's it like for you seeing your World Financial Center buildings without the World Trade Center rising high above them?

I had never imagined them existing without the towers until Sept. 11. But as architects we try to create buildings that fit within their context yet would also be handsome in themselves. It's not as if you were removing one of the legs from a tripod. The aesthetic balance of the World Financial Center was always complete. They just were intended to be good neighbors to the towers.

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