Jonathan Morrison
Why skyscraper king William Pedersen is scaling down, aged 81
The architect’s high-rises populate New York and London. Now he’s coming down, he explains
Look at the skyline of Shanghai, of Hong Kong, of New York, and now of London, and you will find your eyes irresistibly drawn to the work of one man: William Pedersen, known to everyone as Bill, whose buildings bisect the sky. No other architect has designed so many skyscrapers, or so many tall ones. Of the 11 tallest buildings in the world today, six were created by Pedersen and his team at Kohn Pedersen Fox (KPF), the firm he founded in 1976.
And there’s more to come: his work master-planning the Hudson Yards development in Manhattan, which was built on a 35,000-tonne steel and concrete platform over a former railway marshalling yard, has given New York a vast new business district. He has also designed three of the skyscrapers to be built there, including the mammoth 30 Hudson Yards edifice, which has a glass-floored observation deck 300m above the ground that will invariably induce a frisson of vertigo in visiting thrill-seekers as early as next year. Then there’s the £3 billion One Vanderbilt, next to Grand Central Terminal, which will give the Big Apple a soaring new landmark within a few months.
One Vanderbilt in New York (KOHN PEDERSEN FOX)
Yet if you press Pedersen, a sprightly and softly-spoken 81, on which of his many projects is his favourite, the answer might prove surprising. It’s not the lofty 599m Ping An Finance Centre in Shenzen, China, the fourth tallest building in the world, or the tapering 555m Lotte World Tower in Seoul, South Korea, which has won plaudits for its elegance, or even the curvaceous 333 Wacker Drive, the project in Chicago that established his reputation in 1983, but one of the smallest: the Scalpel at 52 Lime Street in the City of London. A sculptural glass and steel blade adjacent to Richard Rogers’s Lloyd’s of London, and Rogers’s less-loved Leadenhall Building (known as the Cheesegrater), it opened last year to little fanfare and is a veritable dwarf in global terms at only 190m tall.
The curvaceous 333 Wacker Drive in Chicago (KOHN PEDERSEN FOX)
“It was never our objective to design the world’s tallest buildings,” Pedersen says when we meet at the building in question. “In fact, I have less interest in that than designing something like Lime Street, which has a strong individual identity, but which connects with what’s around it and forms relationships. Creating a building that responds and gestures to what’s around it is really what I’ve been trying to do for the last 43 years.”
Part of the reason for the angular design, which leans back from the street and the Cheesegrater, was to accommodate the famous sight lines that run through the capital, protecting the iconic views of St Paul’s from treasured viewpoints across the capital, such as Primrose Hill or Blackheath — or, depending on who you believe, from convivial spots outside the favourite pubs of a former planning officer. Did Pedersen find this restrictive compared with New York’s more straightforward regulations?
“One can have two minds about a discretionary system like London has,” he says, “but I found the sight lines inspiring. You have to understand the dynamics of a place and respond to them. Dogmatic requirements like these are producing excellent results and, yes, of course, in a city like London or Paris [where KPF has just refurbished the Tour First in La Défense] there are boundaries and a historical context. But for the city to survive you need to offer spatial opportunities.”
In fact, Pedersen, who started his career by working for IM Pei, the Chinese-American architect who designed the controversial Louvre Pyramid in France, which opened in 1989, remains an unrepentant advocate of building tall. “It makes sense to build tall in general. When coupled with efficient transport nodes, it can make a huge difference in terms of energy conservation and the efficiency of the city itself. My greatest concern about tall buildings is generating a conversation with what’s around.”
Yet isn’t the desire for a super-tall skyscraper — technically defined as anything over 300m — bound up with notions of ego and ostentation, not sympathy for the surroundings? Aren’t they part of a figurative arms race in the Far East to prove who’s top pooch? After all, last year China accounted for 11 of 18 super-talls built worldwide, including the tallest building of the year: the 528m CITIC Tower in Beijing, designed, inevitably, by KPF.
“The symbolic importance of height is hard to escape,” Pedersen acknowledges. “It’s considered by many to be a source of power, leadership and dominance. But the great opportunity of a tall building is that it can become an extraordinary civil participant. The larger they get, the more singular they can become, but the hallmark of the firm is finding some way to connect them to the place itself.”
He points to two examples of this: the Shanghai World Financial Center, finished in 2008, and the International Commerce Centre in Hong Kong, completed in 2010. The first draws on ancient Chinese culture “to fuse itself into the earth and join the sky, standing with serenity and confidence”, and the second, rising on its own in Kowloon, forms a gateway to the bay and a counterpoint to structures on the slopes of Victoria Peak. “If you look across to the skyline, the peak appears and the buildings are almost like vegetation. So we had this sense of the blocks becoming organic things and we tried to make the International Commerce Centre like a husk of corn to reflect this. It turned out to be an elegant building in the process — we can talk about intentions, but the reality of what it looks like is key, even if that’s a highly subjective thing.”
Yet while acknowledging that tastes may shift, he admits that he has been stung by some of the criticism of his Hudson Yards towers, which have received a mixed reception at best. The area has been decried as a millionaires’ playground, where even a haircut costs $800 (£610), and KPF’s huge, angular towers have fallen foul of the critics too: The New Yorker recently described them as “Tolkienesque”.
“I’m exceedingly proud of the buildings,” Pedersen responds. “I put a tremendous amount of effort into Hudson Yards. It’s not adequately acknowledged or recognised how powerful the buildings are as they sit on the skyline.
“But, sure, Hudson Yards is one of the most difficult projects I’ve done. The relationship between the architect and the client is always a contact sport, and the client was challenging. Gene Kohn [one of the founding partners alongside Sheldon Fox] used to say that the test of a great architect was how many projects they turned down, but in reality we don’t turn away that many, so we try to show the possibilities and help clients understand what they really want — and that can be a long process. We’re not offering a Chinese menu or saying, ‘Take it or leave it.’ ”
For his most recent project, though, his client was closer to home: his wife of 58 years, Elizabeth, with whom Pedersen has two daughters, aged 53 and 50. For years the couple had spent weekends and holidays at a small house on Shelter Island, at the eastern end of Long Island, without becoming involved fully in local life, but that was to change when they inherited a dog. They already had a cat, which was “extremely objectionable and couldn’t live together with the dog”, so they advertised for someone to take their cat off their hands and eventually gave it to the head of the Shelter Island Historical Society, which looked after the local museum at Havens House.
“For six months we were waiting for the phone to ring to tell us to take the cat back,” Pedersen says, a little emotional. “When it did ring, it wasn’t about the cat, but about joining the historical society, and Elizabeth was so relieved she immediately agreed to join. Later she would go on to lead it with extraordinary spirit.”
Four years ago Elizabeth was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. She decided that she wanted her legacy to be an overhaul of the Havens House museum, renovating the original wooden-framed structure and creating a new, half-sunken extension that deferred to the diminutive 1743 property. Between them they donated 90 per cent of the $6 million cost, doubling the original space in the process, and Pedersen gave his time for free. Unfortunately, Elizabeth never got to see the centre reopen to the public; she died in July.
“My wife was interviewed just before she died and said she hoped it would be jumping with young people,” Pedersen says. “It’s starting to do that, so it’s become a fitting legacy for her. And I probably had the most pleasurable professional experience of my life.”
So where next for Pedersen? He’s clearly got the energy of a much younger man and, as he admits, architects never really retire. After a period of compassionate leave, he has returned to the drawing board.
“After a lifetime of building skyscrapers, I’m seeing how small I can get,” he says. “I’m gradually working my way down the scale: I’ve got down to this house, I’ve been designing furniture, and I’ve just exhibited a chandelier in Milan, which I’m inordinately proud of. I guess I want to see how far down I can go now.”
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