Cesar Pelli Quotes

In Manchester, you don't have proper tall buildings. Or in Munich.

I grew up in New York.

New York is vertical - all skyscrapers.

I'm about four skyscrapers behind.

Eventually, I think Chicago will be the most beautiful great city left in the world.

I actually grew up in the City of Pasadena.

It is by all odds the loftiest of cities. It even managed to reach the highest point in the sky at the lowest moment of the depression.

What impressed me most about New York were its huge apartment houses.

While the focus in the landscape of Old World cities was commonly government structures, churches, or the residences of rulers, the landscape and the skyline of American cities have boasted their hotels, department stores, office buildings, apartments, and skyscrapers. In this grandeur, Americans have expressed their Booster Pride, their hopes for visitors and new settlers, and customers, for thriving commerce and industry.

...Skyscraper National Park

One cannot completely avoid this landmark character with large buildings such as these. But the city itself is also gigantic.

Many of the projects I'm most proud of are tall buildings, especially the housing projects. In New York I have two: one in Kips Bay and one at New York University. At that time, those projects were most challenging.

I grew up in Ohio. I was born in a suburb of Oakland, but I grew up in Ohio.

I believe in adventure and imagination, and I got that from my parents and the things I experienced as a child.

I didn't actually grow up in London.

Jaipur has definitely turned into a very beautiful city.

Dubai is a vibrant city: Big cars, big buildings... it reminds me of my home town, Hong Kong. People are always on the move here, and there's a lot going on. There are some wonderful architecture and some not-so-wonderful.

The City of New York is like an enormous citadel, a modern Carcassonne. Walking between the magnificent skyscrapers one feels the presence on the fringe of a howling, raging mob, a mob with empty bellies, a mob unshaven and in rags.

Your machinery is beautiful. Your society people have apologized to me for the envious ridicule with which your newspapers have referred to me. Your newspapers are comic but never amusing. Your Water Tower is a castellated monstrosity with pepperboxes stuck all over it. I am amazed that any people could so abuse Gothic art and make a structure not like a water tower but like a tower of a medieval castle. It should be torn down. It is a shame to spend so much money on buildings with such an unsatisfactory result. Your city looks positively dreary.

I look at [Toronto] and think well, perhaps my grandchildren will someday look at this stuff with the sort of appreciation I once held for Art Deco. Although I've come to find Art Deco quite creepy too.

I didn't realize Toronto was so beautiful. Everywhere you go you see beautiful architecture.

Of course, I had a paradigm of a certain city in my head when I wrote these stories, a city that inspired my imagination, but it was only inspiration.

When people condemn me for designing iconic buildings in cities and not having an idea what a city is, they haven't done their homework. I started in urban design and city planning. It's just that when I got out of school there wasn't much of a market for that. There still isn't.

I cannot exaggerate the effect of this marvelous sight on my childish imagination. Day after day I asked myself what is electricity and found no answer. Eighty years have gone by since and I still ask the same question, unable to answer it.

Towns change; they grow or diminish, but hometowns remain as we left them.