Rafael Pelli and Gruen Associates push to restore father César’s masterwork San Bernardino City Hall after 52 years

2024-05-13T17:21:00-04:00

César Pelli was a rising architect when he got the job of designing a new City Hall for San Bernardino. [...] a push is on to renovate City Hall and restore it to use. The lead architect: Rafael Pelli, son of César Pelli. [...] “The idea is to preserve what’s great about it and make it better,” Pelli said of the building. “The bones of it are very good. We just need to bring it forward.”

Chief of among the estimated $60 million renovation tasks is the work of replacing the building’s over 6,000 original windows, which Rafael Pelli says will now be double pane for improved insulation against the heat. The City of San Bernardino, California, shut down operations in the building in 2017 due to seismic concerns. The design features an early version of the same glass curtain facade solution later used in the Pacific Design Center. As the San Bernardino Sun reported, a decision to finance the expected four-year restoration could come as soon as late May.

Rafael Pelli talks about the shifting dynamics of his newly renamed firm

2021-12-06T16:56:00-05:00

One of the biggest desires right now is for flexibility. How can you create spaces that can be repurposed for multifunctional spaces, so you can have a big dinner with a catering kitchen, then close the doors and make it a yoga room? It’s key now to think flexibly about the use of space, then think about flexibility over time, meaning how spaces might evolve.

Rafael Pelli, the son of influential high-rise designer César Pelli, recently talked to Mansion Global about some of the design challenges and new mandates that have taken over the industry in the time following his father’s death in July of 2019.

“Urban cores will go back to being largely what they were,” the architect said. “The very factors that led to their existence and growth remain — it’s that need to communicate, together. At root of that is a basic belief that a lot of really useful things happen outside of a formal meeting [...] That’s not replaced by technology.”

Related on Archinect: In Praise of César Pelli's Quirky Corners

Pelli also commented on the firm’s recent name change, which he says was meant to shift the narrative away from the damaging Great Man archetype of designers as embodied in Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead.

“The most important change was to recognize there’s a core group of people who’ve been working at the firm almost since the beginning. There’s a tende...

Archinect - News

Rafael Pelli and Gruen Associates push to restore father César’s masterwork San Bernardino City Hall after 52 years

Rafael Pelli talks about the shifting dynamics of his newly renamed firm