About this talk

Running time: 29 minutes

Argentine-born César Pelli studied architecture at Tucuman University and the University of Illinois. He worked with Eero Saarinen (see Wright Started It, Corbu Gave It Form, Mies Added Control) from 1954 - 1964, and then with DMJM before becoming a partner in Gruen Associates in 1968. He then set up his own practice in 1977.

He is currently Dean of the School of Architecture at Yale University. He is particularly interested in "thin skin" buildings, whose roots go back to man's earliest huts and tents; simple structures of "bones" with "skin" wrapped round - an architecture of enclosure, not an architecture of weight as in stone buildings. He is equally preoccupied with transparency and flexibility.

He illustrates his ideas with his own designs, buildings all over five storeys high.

You may also be interested to hear Pelli discuss his career in Career Retrospective: César Pelli .