Note: The complete interview with Nick Benson appears in Monuments: Life in Memory.

JD: How much stone cutting did the World War II Memorial involve?

NB: There are 4,682 letters in total—a lot of lettering—in twenty-two inscription locations. The letters vary in size from three-quarters of an inch tall to more than 19 inches.

JD: What kind of granite was used?

NB: It’s a North Carolina granite called Kershaw. One of the reasons [memorial designer] Friedrich St. Florian chose it is because it has an incredibly large grain. Even from a distance, you can see the character of the granite. Finer granite, especially with such large, bold architectural forms, would get lost.
JD: Will the lettering be stained?

NB: Yes. The stain is painted into the interior of each letter with a brush, very pain-stakingly. The stain penetrates the stone, but is transparent so that you can see the quality of the granite through the stain itself. It’s important not to turn this three-dimensional sculptural form into typography. You want these inscriptions to be beautiful, sculptural elements that will partake of the architecture scale of the monument, so you can’t think of the lettering graphically—black on white. Which is what everyone does today. Big mistake.

JD: Do people read inscribed letters as they would text in a book?

NB: They do. The key thing about carved letters in stone, what’s called the “lapidary letter,” is its sculptural quality.

JD: What cuts do you ordinarily use?

NB: I mostly always use V-cut. There are many different types of cuts. People have done all kinds of crazy things—square cuts, pillowed bottoms, double-edge cuts—with the interior treatments of the letter. But, again, you have to do what’s going to work best with the monument. The same goes for the letter design. The actual process of carving the stone is not a terribly difficult skill to learn. You can become a competent carver in three or four years, a fine carver in one or two, but a very good carver in three or four years. The difficulty is in the design of the letter itself.

JD: How do you move forward in a situation where a single mistake can be fatal?

NB: That’s where the skill comes in. You have to know what you’re doing. You’re taking out such small amounts of stone at any given time that it’s not as if you’re going to mistroke and blow out the center of an O. It doesn’t work that way. The strike of the piston and hammer against the chisel is fairly light, and you’re taking off small bits at a time.

JD: How long have you been cutting stone?

NB: Twenty years. My dad taught me. He got me into the shop more than twenty years ago. I started in 1979. I was fifteen and needed a summer job. I wasn’t interested in taking over the family business. My father was hard on me and got me moving quickly, making finished work for him, and carving at the shop level which is a particularly high level of craftsmanship. He has the highest standards of anybody you’re going to find, bar none.

JD: When you look at a block of text are you conscious of individual letters or the entire composition?

NB: Both.

JD: Which comes up first?

NB: The entire composition is key, but the proportion of the letter, the design of the particular letter form itself, is extremely important too. Equally important is the cadence of the text, how the negative space is used, word spacing, line spacing—all of that is absolutely crucial to good inscriptional carving. And very complicated and subtle. That’s the type of thing that people don’t see. The inscription will be easy to read, the letters will look pretty, and they won’t give it a second thought.

JD: When it’s done well, stone cutting is invisible. Do you think of it as art or craft?

NB: I’m an artisan, not a fine artist. I am practicing a very specific craft. In the realm of that craft, there is a certain amount of leeway for artistic interpretation within relatively specific rules. The inscription work on this monument was made to be highly legible, easily read, with no strange idiosyncrasies that would have people scratching their heads and wondering.

JD: My son, who is studying Chinese, told me that in China if a woman has a choice between a handsome man and one who writes beautifully, she will always choose the man with the beautiful handwriting.

NB: I’m not surprised. They’ve got such a reverence for calligraphy over there, and everyone has some skill with the brush. People here appreciate calligraphy, but it doesn’t receive the same reverence. Maybe at some point, people will start studying penmanship again. Wouldn’t that be nice?

JD: Do you judge people based on their handwriting?

NB: Not at all, because when I was a kid, my handwriting was atrocious, nearly illegible.

JD: What happened?

NB: Study, study, study and perseverance. Hermann Zapf, the great type designer, said, “My friends would go out and drink and dance while I stayed at home and bravely drew letter form.” You’ve got to put in the time.

Pelli is concerned with architecture’s social impact—how buildings affect the people who use them and the existing fabric of the cities where they are located. He has created some of the most memorable urban public spaces of the 20th century. Embodying the fundamental idea that good buildings are good for people, his structures are landmarks in cities across the world. They include Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, the tallest building in the world; World Financial Center in Battery Park City, NY; Carnegie Hall Tower in New York City; Herring Hall at Rice University in Houston; Pacific Design Center in Los Angeles; and Reagan National Airport in Washington, DC. For more information, visit: www.cesar-pelli.com.

Below are excerpts from a conversation with Cesar Pelli on May 16, 2003 at his offices in New Haven.

JD: Let’s talk about the metaphoric possibilities of glass, specifically in terms of the Winter Garden and new construction downtown.

CP: Glass is a very old material but for some reason it has become the symbol of the late 20th and early 21st century architecture. I got very interested in designing with glass early in my career. I wrote a couple of articles on glass when I was with Gruen. Then glass started to have a negative image. We noticed that many clients were avoiding us, thinking they would be getting a “glass box.” This was in the late 70s and early 80s. Glass was an anathema.

JD: Fallout from the glass box phase. . .

CP: Exactly. It was a period when people were more interested in solidity, tradition, postmodernism. . .

JD: Assertion . . .

CP: Yes. Now it’s changed again. There is a great interest in glass today. What we have are two, combined phenomenon. One is that, indeed, glass is fashionable and it may not be as fashionable ten years from now. On the other hand, there are some intrinsic qualities of glass that are extraordinary and have nothing to do with fashion; qualities that are very much part of today. Unquestionably, openness and the fact that glass brings light in. Also, one of the beautiful things about glass is its ambiguity. You can see through it, but you also see reflections in the glass at the same time, you see the plane of the glass and you see through as if it wasn’t there. Those complex perceptual qualities, the complexity of seeing, are very much in tune with our lives and our interests today.

JD: Are Americans, people in general, more self-expressed and comfortable with exposure?

CP: Remember Mies van der Rohe’s all-glass building in Berlin and the Tugendghat house in Czechoslovakia—all in Europe, all glass, all before America.

JD: Before 9/11, the main approaches to the Winter Garden were from inside the World Financial Center. Now, the reconfigured façade is the front door.

CP: Yes, it has become the main entrance to the space and, as the reconstruction continues, it will become even more important. When we designed the World Financial Center (WFC), we were responding to the World Trade Center (WTC) which already existed there with all of its idiosyncrasies. Now, Libeskind, and whoever designs down there, has to respond to what we have done at the WFC. At the point where Fulton Street turns, you can see the Winter Garden at the end of the vista. The first time I saw the Winter Garden after September 11th, a few weeks later, I was walking down Broadway. I thought, my God, there’s the Winter Garden, right there!

JD: How extraordinary to have the opportunity to reconfigure a major component of your building.

CP: It is a bittersweet thing. The loss of the [North Bridge] was a great loss. People arrived through the bridge at the top of the great staircase. It was a great arrival point.

JD: The WFC was unusually gracious in the way it so modestly —in a gigantic way—existed in the shadow of the Trade towers. Now, it has a second life

CP: We had designed the WFC to fit into the composition with the WTC towers. I have always been bothered by the way the Trade Towers were so out of scale. I thought my responsibility was to bring them, as much as possible, into harmony with the rest. Which I think it did.

That was the guiding force in the design. What is wonderful, within everything else that was so terrible, is that when you see the WFC now, from the water, it looks fantastic. If the towers had never been there, the WFC would have been a perfectly handsome composition. Another issue is memory. We all know the towers were there. It’s not the same as if the towers had never been there. It’s a different equation. The physical reality would be the same, but the emotional and perceptual reality are different.

JD: Do you find yourself trying to put the towers back, in your mind’s eye?

CP: They will never go away. This will affect everything that Libeskind does. He will have to deal with the memory of the towers. If the towers had come down because they had discovered asbestos, because they were not renting, or for some other mundane reason, people would forget them. However, today, those images have been seared into people’s minds. Until everyone living on September 11, 2001, at least, passes away, the memory of the towers is going to be incredibly important to anything that happens there.

JD: The view from the new balcony at the Winter Garden accommodates a natural human urge to want to see the WTC site, while it anticipates and demands that something wonderful happen there.

CP: Now it is a part of everything that will happen down there. You will be able to follow everything that happens at Ground Zero.

JD: The balcony space is a proscenium, very theatrical.

CP: Yes, it is. I hate to use the word theatrical because it has connotations of frivolity and this is a sacred place. But, indeed, it does create the feeling that you are on a balcony watching a stage. It is a live stage, much more of a reality show than any TV program. This is true drama unfolding before your eyes. I would think that this will have to have an effect on what is designed there. I would recommend to all of those competing in the WTC memorial competition to spend some time on that perch. There are other good perches at the WFC too. In the hexagonal building, Gatehouse B, there are good views on the upper level.

JD: When you design a building—something that will outlast you, me, most of us—do you think of it as a historic, future artifact?

CP: No, I don’t think of it as a historic artifact. I think of its future in limited ways. I have never designed a true monument. I have designed primarily buildings for life, for activity. I see all of these buildings, like the people who occupy them, as being perishable and fragile, with a life that may change. I think of my buildings as living things and am less concerned with an existence beyond this limited capability. Once they cease to live, it doesn’t matter what happens.

JD: But Petronas Towers is pulling Malaysia into the future.

CP: Yes, I am very aware that the Petronas Towers have a double potential. One is to be, like all my buildings, an element of use. Once its use is finished, it ceases to have value. But because of when, where and how it was built, and the extraordinary impact it has had in Malaysia, it offers the potential for the Malaysians to keep that building well beyond its normal functioning. This is true of other buildings too.

JD: What I’m getting at is that the Petronas Towers have inspired the construction of other structures, they have brought in new business, they are molding that part of the world. Obviously, they are affecting other places too, because everyone know their image and is aware of their height. In these ways, they are futuristic.

CP: Yes. Indeed, our client never said it in so many words, but it was obvious that they wanted a building symbol, not a monument, but a symbol. Although some of the qualities of a monument are also in those buildings. An essential quality of a monument for me, from which much of its power and beauty are derived, is what the monument commemorates or celebrates. If the Vietnam Memorial were not a commemoration, if someone had simply planted two granite slabs in the ground, it would not have the power it has because of its intimate association with the Vietnam War. It allows people to make a connection with their loved ones who died there. The monument gains much of its power and beauty from the fact of the war.

JD: The shape of the Vietnam Wall was determined by the event itself. The wall rises according to the rising body count.

CP: Maya Lin’s interpretation is one of the great pieces of art or architecture of the twentieth century.

JD: What other monuments speak to you?

CP: Unquestionably, the oldest one, the pyramids in Egypt. They are about power. They are more than just a form, though so much is implicit in their form. It is an extraordinary achievement, built when technology was quite basic. It’s hard to imagine the colossal effort involved. It was done with the sweat and blood of many people. They are also the tombs of kings, gods. Their age, the fact that they are in the desert. All of this contributes to create their overwhelming, psychological power.

JD: Do you have an affinity for a particular shape? Do you find yourself drawn to triangles, circles, or squares?

CP: That’s an interesting question. No, I’m very open. As an architect, I don’t see shapes as goals in themselves. If I were a sculptor or a painter, it would be different. For me, shapes are seen in relationship to where they are. I believe that every building is a piece of a larger whole. I couldn’t say that all holes require triangles or circles. Some require a triangle, some require a circle. It depends on the circumstances, the purpose of the building, and the place where the building will be built. That’s the nature of architecture.

JD: For good architects, at least!

CP: Have you been to Delphi? It is one of those places that is unusually charged. I don’t know if it comes from the form or the natural environment. It seems to be a place where all resonances are amplified. You can feel it. You can see why the Greeks chose this place for the Oracle. More than the monument itself, it was their choice of an incredible place and marking it, that made it sacred.

JD: When I’m at a place that I’ve been told is sacred, I wonder if I would feel its sacredness if I hadn’t been told beforehand. Do you think there are energy centers on earth?

CP: Unquestionably, Delphi is one of those places where you feel it. I also feel it in the open prairie. Going through the fields of wheat in Kansas, that seem to extend forever, for me is an overwhelming experience. I don’t think this is necessarily is in the space, I think it is in us. Something resonates in us.

JD: Is it because we become conscious of our small size? I feel that same way when I am on the ocean, in the presence of a vast absence of form.

CP: Absolutely. I have never been on the ocean like that but I can imagine it is the state of Kansas multiplied a thousand times!

JD: Is it the absence of form?

CP: Nothingness is very powerful. The pyramids, alone in the desert, are powerful images. But Delphi is a concentrated space in a narrow valley.

JD: It’s an interesting question: Does power emanate from the monument, the land, or from what’s not there?

CP: We are complex beings. We respond to many different stimuli. Many things make our internal harp vibrate. When I go to the Vietnam Memorial, the memories of all that the Vietnam War meant are instantly present in me. It is a conjunction of my understanding of what Vietnam meant and of the artistic reality of the wall.

JD: Why do you think we are building so many monuments these days?

CP: I don’t know. It’s a curious phenomenon. It probably indicates a need that we collectively are trying to address. We need to mark something that is more important than daily life. At some times in America, we have not felt that need, but at other times, like now, it appears to be extremely important. Also, it has political overtones. Unquestionably, the success of Maya Lin’s Vietnam Memorial has made people think that we can do another one as good as that.

Most other memorials in Washington are disappointing. The Roosevelt Memorial is very disappointing as is the Korean War Memorial. Those things, the soldiers, the women, they’ve added to the Vietnam Memorial are horrendous. The other great monuments, of course, are the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial. Now, if that was Ulysses Grant sitting there, that memorial would lose much of its power and beauty.

JD: Lincoln was the closest thing we had to an American god. His memorial is a simple, classical structure. We see the seated Lincoln, the Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural Address. And that’s it. Is that its power—that it is elemental and not full of furniture like the FDR Memorial?

CP: Well, no, because the Jefferson Memorial is also very simple and it has no power. And I also have great admiration for Jefferson. The Washington Memorial is very powerful, and it doesn’t tell you anything. It’s an obelisk, a form borrowed from the Egyptians.

I have always been interested in why very tall buildings are so powerful. I’ll go straight to the punch line: I believe it is in our physical nature. The human being is a very unusual creature that walks vertically. Our eyes are near the very top of the stick. The power of a sculpture by Giacometti is because he reduces people to that essence of the vertical line. Obelisks are an attempt not to recreate the human form but to recreate the verticality that is the nature of the human form. They are extremely vertical. Humans are tenuously vertical—indeed, if you fall asleep or dead, you’re down.

JD: How does this idea, that we’re vertical beings, relate to the power of a tall building?

CP: The obelisk is an extremely vertical thing, beyond normal. The pyramids recreate a gravity form. When you play in the sand and create a conical pyramid, it reaches its angle of repose. Pyramids are close to the angle of repose so that they look like elements of the earth. But an obelisk goes well beyond the angle of repose. It is standing there, like we are, almost defying the law of gravity. You can sense this in the Washington Monument very clearly.

JD: What is the difference between gazing up at a tower and climbing it?

CP: They are both part of our aspiration to move up. I have checked into the thesaurus and the synonyms relating to up or high are all incredibly positive. Elevated, noble. All of the words relating to low height are negative. The fact that relative height has affected our language means that this feeling is deep in us. Look up! That means you are looking at things with a higher value. It permeates our consciousness. Looking up you are admiring something that is higher than you. Climbing up, you reach a point where people look up to you. They both come from the same, natural human impetus but one is outside of us, and the other a part of us.

JD: How does memory affect the way you design?

CP: Memory considerations are an integral part of my designs. When we start to design a building, we make a photographic record of buildings in that city. Most of them are nearby, but we include all notable buildings that aren’t nearby. One of us in the team will go to the library and research important buildings that used to exist, that have been torn down. In some cities, it is amazing the number of great buildings that don’t exist anymore. In many cases, they still exist in the memory of their people. If you are designing a building that will become truly part of a city, then you need to deal with the whole environment, not only the physical environment that is seen everyday but also with what is remembered.

To give an obvious example, you could not design anything near the World Trade Center site and ignore what used to be there. That would be foolish. That is an extreme case. The WTC towers left such strong memories in all of us.

But this happens at all levels: you remember trees, for example. When I first came to the University of Illinois, the walkways were lined with giant elm trees. Shortly after I left, they were cut down because of Dutch Elm disease. This is almost fifty years ago, but I cannot go back to that campus and see it without the elm trees. For me, they’re still there. I can’t help compare what’s there with what it used to be, with the way the buildings now relate to each other, and how they used to. What’s interesting is that young students who never saw those elms are aware of them too. Although they have never seen the elms, they are part of the collective memory which goes beyond the memory of any one individual.

When we see the pyramids of Egypt, we participate in the collective memory that somehow ties us back to what was happening in the world many centuries ago. It is the collective memory, memory that lives again when we read history. History is a restitching of memory. Collective memory is not just what people keep in their heads, it’s what’s in books, sculptures, paintings —that’s all part of the collective memory. It is those things that have been written down to help us remember. Works such as the Iliad, the Odyssey, were composed and became poems that could be remembered by people before books existed so that these extraordinary events could be remembered much longer than the memory of the people who participated in them.

They are, in every case, memory records of the interactions between gods and humans, which are critical in any society. The Bible, the Iliad, the Odyssey were books that shaped behavior and morals in their respective societies. Monuments also make people remember. Cheops wanted to be remembered, and his investment worked, while the monument of Halicarnassus disappeared. Some monuments remain, others don’t.

JD: What is it about stone that inspires such a sense of memory?

CP: Stone has been for centuries the strongest, most durable building material human beings have had. They have given form for centuries to the most prized, monumental and important structures. We make immediate associations of stone used in this manner with all that has been previously expressed in stone.

In Japan, it’s another story. They built with stone but it doesn’t have the value it has in Mediterranean countries where our culture was born. In the northern forests—Scandinavia, Russia, Japan—most of the structures were wood. The Japanese developed a different attitude. The Temple of Ise is taken down every twenty years and rebuilt next door. So it’s not the physical object that remains, it is the design that remains. This is extraordinary and in some ways much more poetic. It is about life.

JD: Did they use wood because it constantly replenishes itself, as nature replenishes the world?

CP: Yes, and also because, after a while, wood rots. Both stone and wood are about our extension of ourselves in time, and how we maintain forms and ideas. In the case of the pyramids, an incredible first effort is required, you make it as strong as you can so that afterwards it can fend for itself against weather, thieves, vandals.

In the Japanese tradition, wood depends on continuous care and maintenance. It accepts that in the moment that people stop caring, the moment you stop believing, that monument will disappear. Today, even if one stopped believing in the gods, Ise would probably be maintained because it is a national treasure. But it requires continuous care. In many ways, contemporary steel and glass buildings are like wood: if you leave them alone, the glass will break, the steel will rust. It will take longer, but they will also become a pile of rubble unless they are continuously kept up. When a window breaks or steel rusts, you must replace it.

Stone can also be used in ways that require continuous care. In most of the Gothic cathedrals, stone was not used to be massive and permanent, it was cut to be as thin and slender as possible. Because stone also decays, though at a slower rate, in most cathedrals there are people who are permanently taking care of the stones. They replace them, one by one. If you think of stone in terms of Roman construction—the Pantheon or the Coliseum—those will take care of themselves for centuries, but if you think of stone in terms of Chartres, it won’t. Windows will break, water will come in, and the stone will suffer and corrode. As soon as a piece of stone in a flying buttress breaks away, the whole building, or a chunk of it, may come down.

JD: George [Knight] and I were talking about full-body immersion fonts, for baptism, about the idea of descending into death and rising into life. . .

CP: . . . which was supposed to be charged with some sense of fright. You are dying when you go down and are reborn as you emerge from the water. Very beautiful, a symbolic sacrifice.

JD: Yes, you physically descend, but the rising, the true rising, is in your heart and your head. It’s not tangible. I wish there was some way to capture in this book that sense of going down and coming up. I don’t know if it can be done visually.

CP: There is some of that in Maya Lin’s [Vietnam Veterans Memorial], unquestionably. You start at one end, descend and come up. Although that idea is not explicit—I don’t know if she did it unconsciously or not—but the wall connects with ancient rituals. The idea of going down and coming up, of death and rebirth, occurs in many different cultures. In some ways, memorials about tragedies require recreating a sense of death and rebirth.