César Pelli, architect behind the Petronas Towers, dies at 92

The architect César Pelli, who designed some of the world’s tallest and best-known buildings, has died. He was 92.

Anibal Bellomio, a senior associate architect at Pelli’s studio in Connecticut, confirmed that the Argentinian-born American citizen died peacefully on Friday at his home in New Haven.

Pelli was a former dean of the Yale University School of Architecture and a lecturer at the school, where he received an honorary degree.

The Argentinian president, Mauricio Macri, wrote on Twitter: “I want to send my condolences to the family and friends of the talented César Pelli. The works he leaves throughout the world as a legacy are a pride for all Argentines.”

In his own tweet, the Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic Paul Goldberger saluted “a warm and gracious man, a civilising presence in his life and his work, an architect of great dignity and lively creativity who did as much as anyone in the last generation to evolve the form of the skyscraper.”

One of Pelli’s best-known projects is the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, twin 1,483ft skyscrapers that were once the tallest buildings in the world. He also designed the Salesforce Tower in San Francisco and the World Financial Center, now known as Brookfield Place, in downtown Manhattan.

Goldberger added: “The world of architecture has lost six … great figures in recent months: Phil Freelon, Florence Knoll and Stanley Tigerman, in addition to Kevin Roche, IM Pei and now César Pelli. RIP.”

Pelli was born in San Miguel de Tucumán in Argentina in 1926. He went to the US to study in 1952, becoming a citizen in 1964. Before establishing his own practice he worked for the Finnish modernist Eero Saarinen on projects including the famous TWA terminal at JFK airport in New York. In the 1980s, he expanded the Museum of Modern Art (Moma) in Manhattan.

Abroad, he designed One Canada Square at Canary Wharf in London’s Docklands, which opened in 1991. Prince Charles, a determined foe of modern architecture, was not a fan. The Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur were completed in 1997.

On Saturday, the architectural historian Carol Willis told the Washington Post: “Pelli’s career shows that you can be a modernist without being tied to a rigorous vocabulary of form or structure, or curtain walls of glass. He embraced the full spectrum of materials – be it stone or stainless steel, or color and pattern – while remaining true to the spirit of modernism.”

But the Post also quoted a remark by Pelli to the LA Times in 1990 about a key material: “Glass is fragile as the wings of a butterfly. It’s alternatively opaque and transparent, ephemeral and light-sensitive, reflecting the changes of the sky color and tone.”

Pelli’s work was always striking. In a 1979 piece for Time magazine, Robert Hughes discussed his Pacific Design Center, a huge, glass-clad 1976 project which the critic said had been “assimilated into the local folklore of Los Angeles quicker than any building in recent memory, because it is so violently at odds with its flat suburban context.

“Known as the Blue Whale,” Hughes wrote, “it is an immense exhibition hall, the Crystal Palace of the west coast.”

The cladding Pelli gave the building, Hughes said, “is not mirror, but semi-translucent blue glass, which glitters and disappears and re-forms against the dusty blue sky. In form, it resembles an extruded architectural molding: one single block. Its scale is its success; a vast illusion built for the luxury interior-decoration industry, plunked firmly down in Dreamsville.”