If You Build It… –
July 20, 2019 – Although Mr. Pelli’s office thrived, the MoMA building didn’t. Completed in 1984, a portion of it was torn down in 2002 so that the museum could replace it with a larger structure by the Japanese architect Yoshio Taniguchi.
Mr. Pelli said he wasn’t hurt by seeing some of his building disappear, which he understood as motivated by changes in the museum’s mission. “Life is full of surprises,” Mr. Pelli said, adding that he enjoyed more than his share of good ones. Indeed, he considered his entire career improbable. Cesar Pelli was born on Oct. 12, 1926, in San Miguel de Tucumán, a small city in northern Argentina, where, he said, there was no architecture to speak of. (His mother was a teacher; his father, a civil servant reduced by the Depression to doing odd jobs.)
