Archinect - News

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.

Citigroup taps WilkinsonEyre to transform its aging 25 Canada Square headquarters

2022-01-28T05:00:00-05:00

An aging financial relic in London’s Canary Wharf is about to become the capital city’s next high-profile retrofit project thanks to a new plan from WilkinsonEyre.

Architects’ Journal UK is reporting that the firm will lead a massive retrofit of the 21-year-old structure after the financial house has apparently opted away from its original demolition plans.

The need for more adaptive reuse efforts has been much publicized of late, especially in London, where major projects like the Barbican Centre redesign and RIBA’s recently-announced Portland Place overhaul establish high-profile showcases. The decision on Citigroup’s part is being framed as a significant victory for AR proponents across the country.

WilkinsonEyre’s efforts will involve the reuse of over 100,000 tonnes of embodied carbon in the transformation of Cesar Pelli’s original 1.2-million-square-foot structure into a more flexible modern office space that is more in tune with the post-pandemic demands on workers. Offices...

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...

César Pelli has passed away

2019-07-19T23:57:00-04:00

Argentina’s Telam state news agency reported his passing on Friday, as did the governor of Tucuman province, where Pelli grew up and spent his formative years. “With much regret we receive the sad news of the death of the great Architect César Pelli,” the region’s governor, Juan Manzur, said in a post on Twitter. “I want to convey my condolences to his whole family, his friends and his team.”

César Pelli, a prolific and relentlessly inventive architect who has shaped the skylines of major cities from Los Angeles to San Francisco, New York City, and Kuala Lumpur, has passed away at age 92.

News of Pelli’s death came from Argentina’s state news service Friday afternoon, according to Reuters.

San Francisco’s new $2.2 billion Salesforce Transit Center closed after 2nd steel beam cracks

2018-09-27T17:48:00-04:00

San Francisco’s new Transbay Transit Center will remain closed at least through the end of next week, officials said Wednesday, after yet another cracked beam was discovered during an overnight safety inspection. The $2.2 billion hub for buses and eventually trains, which opened just last month as the flashy centerpiece of city infrastructure, was closed abruptly Tuesday afternoon after a fissure was spotted in a beam that helps hold up the sprawling complex.

In a statement issued on September 26, Executive Director of the Transbay Joint Powers Authority, Mark Zabaneh, said: "We apologize for this inconvenience to the public and commuters. I would like to assure the public, this is a localized issue within the transit center and there is no impact to any adjacent properties. Additionally, our current analysis shows that this is contained within the Fremont Street area. The safety of everyone who visits the Salesforce Transit Center is our highest priority and we will work expeditiously to address and rectify this situation."

Meanwhile, not far away from the Transit Center, another sizable, troubled San Francisco building struggles to stay structurally sound: the sinking Millennium Tower risks getting yellow-tagged by the city if its newly appeared cracks aren't being addressed.

Gensler, Jeanne Gang and Cesar Pelli, SOM among firms competing for Chicago Union Station redevelopment

2016-09-15T13:44:00-04:00

Chicago’s Union Station is slated to get a $1 billion facelift that could add up to 3 million sq. ft. of new buildings. Amtrak just announced a shortlist of four contenders for the gig, as reported by Chicago Real Estate Daily.

The shortlist comprises the development firms John Buck, Riverside Investment & Development, Golub and Sterling Bay. Each of the developers has a noted architectural practice on board; respectively, Jeanne Gang and Cesar Pelli, Goettsch Partners, Gensler, and Skidmore Owings & Merrill.

The teams were selected from an RFQ and will now move on to the proposal stage, with plans due by the beginning of 2017. According to Amtrak, the winning proposal will be selected by the end of the first quarter.

The winning firm could build on top of existing buildings, on land owned by Amtrak, or over the train tracks. Amtrak owns 14 acres of land and up to 3 million square feet in air rights.

According to preliminary plans, the development will include office, retail, hotel...

Let's talk about money in architecture

2015-02-25T13:00:00-05:00

Although money is often seen as a taboo topic in art schools, a group of Yale alumni is urging professional architects to place more value on the relationship between money and architecture. The Yale Architectural Journal’s latest edition, titled “Money,” discusses the controversial role of money in the field of architecture. [...] ranging from Frank Gehry to Yale School of Architecture Professor Keller Easterling, the issue urges architects to reconsider the financial side of their work.

More about Perspecta 47: Money here.

A Stunning Survey Of Pics By Eero Saarinen's In-House Photog

2012-08-15T15:02:00-04:00

In 1954, a young Hungarian went to work with Eero Saarinen in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. As his then colleague, Cesar Pelli, describes him: “[He] was a small sensation: he had a fur-trimmed coat, a homburg, and a Van Dyke beard.”... He had been a distinguished architectural student at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, in Paris, and a draftsman under Le Corbusier... he was quickly tapped as the in-house photographer, creating pictures that became indelible symbols of the Mad Men age of Modernism.

Cesar Pelli's that 70's dream is about to come true

2011-05-07T14:56:00-04:00

When architect Cesar Pelli built his aka 'Blue Whale' Pacific Design Center in 1975, the West Coast officially declared it was going to be the center of the decorating universe. Almost forty years later, and with the addition of green and red compartments, that primary-shaped colorful dream is nearly and retroactively fulfilled. One potential problem is, centrally located design showrooms are also so yesterday, and there are floors of vacant office spaces everywhere in the city.