World Financial Center
THE WORLD Financial Center has little of the épater le bourgeois confrontationalism of such earlier postmodern landmarks as Philip Johnson’s AT&T Building. Instead, the courtly, Argentinean-born Cesar Pelli, who was the dean of Yale’s graduate departm
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h e w o r l d Financial Center has little of the épater le bourgeois confrontationalism of such earlier postmodern landmarks as Philip Johnson’s AT&T Building. Instead, the courtly, Argentinean-born Cesar Pelli, who was the dean of Yale’s graduate department of architecture, uses postmodernism as an evolution rather than a negation of modernism. The four blunt towers of his World Financial Center, which range in height from 34 to 51 stories, recap and extend the development of skyscraper style. The setback façades recount the history of the skyscraper. Each tower is divided into five major sections. The platforms appear to be largely lithic, with windows punctuating a granite-framed façade, evoking the first masonry skyscrapers. The proportions of stone and glass change at the setbacks. At the second setback the balance of stone and glass is more even, recalling the regularity of Rockefeller Center and its extension west of Sixth Avenue. The third setback before the attic is more open and glassy, with only the thinnest grid of superimposed granite mullions, like postwar high-modernist skyscrapers. At the very top stories, the form of the pure glass cube emerges, like Skidmore, Owings & Merrill’s flush glass towers, but Pelli caps these with purely ornamental copper crowns in the form of a pure pyramid, a stepped-back pyramid, a dome, and a mastaba. The setback heights at the third, ninth, and twenty-fourth floors were determined by the New York State Urban Development Council, so that the complex would relate to the predominant building heights of Lower Manhattan. Pelli’s towers are wittily contextual: the mastaba atop the 40-story-tall No. 1 is a visual echo of the mansard roof of Cass Gilbert’s West Street Building, across the street. The orthogonal shaft of No. 3 is torqued on its irregular base, like the influential modernist parti of Ralph Walker’s catercorner Barclay-Vesey Building. “The city is more important than the building,” Pelli said.
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CESAR PELLI ,
1985–92
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“The building is more important than the architect. I connect with what is strongest in each place.” Pelli’s towers reveal themselves to be layers of buildings, or buildings within buildings. He refers to the levels of cladding as “jackets.” The setbacks also penetrate inward, like missing cake slices, revealing the core structure of glass and steel beneath the granite. The façades balance contradictory elements; corner pillars that appear to be square blocks of granite stand revealed from another angle as thin façades covering round steel columns. All three stages of the illusion are revealed in one vista: fully sheathed column, column standing beside façade, and
fully exposed column. Similarly, flush windows appear next to windows with deeply punched reveals, each negating the validity of the other: Is the granite wall thick and weight-bearing, or a mere screen? Pelli’s contribution is to make structure and nonstructure appear as part of a unified, modernist-inspired continuum. However, critic Vincent Scully called the result “bulbous
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