William Pedersen designed Hong Kong’s newest signature tower and the Shanghai World Financial Center. The hassles in Shanghai were a pain in the superstructure

WILLIAM PEDERSEN went to the University of Minnesota to play hockey, although he studied architecture as well. When he realized he was doing neither very well, he made a choice and hung up his skates.

Pedersen’s eyes light up when he talks about the game, and his team picture sits on his desk. At 70, he still thinks of himself as an athlete. (Given that he bikes 160 km each week, he’s entitled.) But it’s hard to argue with his career decision.

After finishing college and completing graduate studies at MIT, Pedersen joined I M Pei’s office and then, in 1976, formed the firm of Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates with two partners. Initially focused on commercial real estate, KPF went on to create skyscrapers that boldly announced their presence but also fit into their surroundings. From a base in New York, the firm moved across America, building headquarters for the World Bank in Washington, DC, Proctor and Gamble in Cincinnati, and USA Today in northern Virginia. Over the years, KPF also established a strong presence in East Asia – Hong Kong, China, Korea and Japan – and the Middle East.

This past September, the Shanghai World Financial Center, built by Japan’s Mori Building Co and designed by KPF, officially opened its doors in Pudong. Rising to 492m, it is – for now, anyway – the world’s second-tallest building. In 2010, Pedersen will have another entry in that lofty ledger, when KPF is scheduled to complete construction of the 484m International Commerce Center in Kowloon. Additionally, KPF was commissioned to build an entire city in South Korea – New Songdo City, a special economic zone located near Incheon Airport.
Given the scale on which he often works, Pedersen’s office is surprisingly small and humble. There is no door. His narrow desk, which abuts one window, holds stacks of grease pencils, a small laptop and a picture of an antique boat he sails when he can. A shelf against the other window holds numerous models – some that were built, some that were altered, some that never materialized. The walls are decorated with an original sketch of the SWFC and a drawing of the house he built outside New York City for himself and his wife of 47 years. The center of the room is occupied by a meeting table – an indication of the importance he places on communal space.

Pedersen is open and energetic, frequently unfurling rolls of wax paper to make diagrams to illustrate his points, and beginning our conversation with some enthusiastic recollections of a recent trip to India. “The work of the Mughal period, I think, is probably some of the finest architectural work ever done,” he says. “When you go to Fatehpur Sikhri and see Akbar’s city there, it’s just enough to make you weep, it’s so incredibly beautiful.”

When you see structures like that, can you imagine what the architect was trying to do?
The process then, I suppose, had so much to do with the hierarchy, the nobility, and the leadership determining that something should represent them and their period on earth, which was to be commensurate with their perceived value, I guess, or their perceived world view. Certainly in the case of Akbar. He created an entire city, a fabric of interrelated spaces that showed a tremendous interest in a general humanist attitude.

Where we are at this point in time compared to where they were, it’s a little humbling, to be honest – on all sorts of levels. Even on a technological level, just to be able to accomplish that. The unbelievable geometries that those people were capable of computing, without any computers or anything of that nature; probably very few drawings as well.

Can one put oneself into that position? Well, in some respects yes. For example, the building that we’re just finishing in China …

The Shanghai World Financial Center?
Yes. We worked for Mr Mori, who is a very wealthy and influential developer, but he is also a developer quite unlike those that one encounters elsewhere. He has a world view about what he’s trying to accomplish. In Japan, he feels that so much time is wasted by transportation from the place of residence to the place of work. His thing is that you could have a work-live situation within the city. The buildings he conceives, the developments that he conceives, are really intended to be a city within a city, and not just isolated pieces of commercial real estate that are intended as financial instruments. It’s intended to do much more. It’s intended to create a quality of life.

Is the idea of sustainability becoming more important across the board in design?
Yeah, I think it’s more important as a world theme. But the understanding of sustainability is also something that’s probably going through an evolutionary phase, because just putting wind turbines and photovoltaic cells on a building doesn’t necessarily make it greener or sustainable. I think that the concept of a building’s sustainability needs to involve its construction as well as its operation. A highly sustainable building is one where the amount of energy that goes into building is as efficient as the building itself. So that makes it a little more difficult to quantify. That requires these metrics that haven’t really fully evolved at this stage.

And you’re trying to apply it to skyscrapers, some of the world’s tallest buildings?
The tall building during the 1980s was thought of as an instrument of exploitation by developers. But what has happened in the last 30 years is a recognition that this is an issue of “How do you build on this earth for another three billion people in a way that is not going to destroy the planet and all that obviously hangs in the balance?”

Build a building like that one for example [he points to a model of the SWFC] and you can house 5,000 people or 8,000 people with far less material. You have far less surface area. You have far less structural weight per capita within the building than if you have, let’s say, 50 buildings of smaller dimensions.

Secondly, it’s infrastructure and its relationship to structure. I think Asia, particularly a place like Hong Kong, is illustrative of that, where the transportation systems and the nodes of the transportation system are sponsoring the major developments. All that that’s going on in Kowloon: it’s the second stop for the train coming in from the airport. It’s a real nexus right there so that’s where all the development takes place. It makes so much sense.

It seems cities like Hong Kong are ahead of the game on that score.
I feel the evolution of the cities in Asia will lead to the cities of the future. Because, one, the problems of density are greater and, two, reliance on the automobile is considerably less, although Japan has a lot, of course. But it’s really showing the potential of the connection between infrastructure and architecture, and potentially making extremely vital places within a city. It’s not that we haven’t had these examples. To me, the greatest example of all time is Rockefeller Center. It’s an example of a mixed use – there’s no residential in it, but it has a tremendous vitality. The architecture is probably the finest ever created for commercial architecture. It creates a spatial quality as well as an object quality in the buildings themselves. It creates a focus – it’s a city within a city.

Can the kind of vertical building you’re talking about be done without tearing down the old neighborhoods that have real character and value but are increasingly being swept away in the name of …
“Progress.” Well, Singapore, of course, is really a good example of a place where they wiped all these neighborhoods off the map, and now, after having done so, they’re realizing they had a tremendous value, from a lot of perspectives, not just social. But when the history of a place is gone, it’s no longer the same place.

In European cities you find this all the time, the need to connect into an existing fabric. And so, that’s one of the fundamental responsibilities of the tall building: to be able to work at different scales. As you know, Pudong is just a series of office buildings. There’s no fabric at all. So there, because of the visual cacophony of the place, the intent was to try to create something that was as serene and elegant and restrained as possible, so that building was the product of it. It sits quietly but nobly in its position. In a way, this is almost like a cathedral in a medieval town – stretching it, obviously – but a medieval town where the town’s fabric is about this scale [he draws a line representing lower-lying buildings] and then the great cathedral sat above it like that. 

I understand you try to use indigenous symbols and ideas in your buildings.
In the case of this building here [the Shanghai building] it was a little more difficult because it was so big and Pudong is sort of an unprecedented place. How do you make a building like this relate to China and relate to the traditions of the place? If one is to make a very tall building, you can do it exactly like the building across the street, which is the Jin Mao Tower, and sort of make a 500m pagoda. That’s one way of doing it. We wanted to find a way of setting up a relationship that had a little bit more energy. So we started to think in terms of the building as a connection between the earth down here [draws lines at the bottom of the page] and the sky up here [draws lines at the top]. How does one make the connection between these two things? Well, in ancient Chinese tradition, they took a symbol like this [draws an upright rectangle], which is an earth symbol. It is about 46cm high, made of dark stone, and they buried this along with this symbol here [draws a circle with an empty middle, like a donut], which was the symbol of the sky and the heavens. And those two symbols were buried with prominent individuals.

Did the developer give you the specs of the building?
He wanted it to be 500m. He wanted a hotel, he wanted an office building and he wanted a lot of retail stuff. And then he wanted to have something on top for observation. So, what we did, and this came about [he brings over the original models for the building], this was done in 1992. This was done in 93. It started out being [he draws it again] square prism, like that. And then, what we did was we simply cut off all of that material right there on both sides of it, just shaved it off. And what that did was create, down at the bottom of the building, ideal floor space for an office building.

And the empty space at the top that was the sky symbol?
Our structural engineer said because of the great height of the building, it is just a cantilevered beam. The wind pressure is so great that it tends to push it over. So we had to have an aperture. I said, “Well, the Chinese always have moon gates, you know?” And that’s what we did. And everyone knows the story of the political problems associated with this.

It was seen as Japan’s rising sun?
Yeah. I presented it in China to 14 professors of architecture. I made a 10-minute presentation and they each had a half hour to respond. It lasted seven hours. The first woman started off and she, I thought, was going to give me a wonderful send-off. She had such a wonderful smile. She was in her 60s or 70s. She used the only words of English that day and she said, “Well, perhaps this building is acceptable, but it certainly isn’t desirable.” That was how we started. They were so opaque about what was wrong. But finally, a month later, we saw in a Hong Kong newspaper, “Japanese Architect Marches Into Shanghai With the Flag Held High.”

It took a month until you understood what the issue was?
No one directly said it. Then we had a meeting in Tokyo with the deputy mayor of Shanghai. He explained to Mr Mori about the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II and that there are a lot of issues that are very sensitive. So I suggested, let’s put a bridge across it, like this [draws line through the circle] and we can possibly create something that defuses the power of the circle and symbolizes the joining of the sides. He was thrilled with it. He sent a beautiful letter with a gold seal. And I felt like Henry Kissinger in that I’d solved some big problems. But finally it was determined that this [the circle] was not an acceptable form under any circumstances. So we ended up putting in the trapezoid. And frankly, the pure circle was the strongest. The circle with the bridge across it never really looked that good. The benefit of this [the trapezoid] is that it enables this incredible bridge up on the top.  Have you been in the building?

No, I haven’t.
It’s an amazing experience up there. Mr Mori has three floors of restaurants and meeting rooms that sit within a huge void [at the bottom of the trapezoid] and then right here, there’s a huge room that’s going to be used for everything conceivable: Jose Carrera sang there at the opening night. And below that is the hotel, and then the office building starts.

But the beauty of this building is that this is all civic [the area at the top] anybody can go there. You don’t really know that this is an office building. When you take the top of a building like that and devote it to everybody, then the bottom of the building gives the impression that anybody can go into it as well.

Traveling abroad these days, you see a lot of the same products, the shops are the same, the same TV shows and channels. Is there an international style of architecture – a globalist style – that’s bringing places closer together but also de-emphasizing their uniqueness?
That’s obviously a huge problem. There was at one point in time a concept of “international style” or architecture that wasn’t place-related, it was totally related to use. So the Seagram building in New York could have been built in Chicago – in fact, [architect] Mies [van der Rohe] built the same building in five or six different places. And some people believe that an office building is an office building is an office building, and wherever they’re located, it doesn’t make a hell of a lot of difference. I don’t happen to believe that because it’s not very interesting for me.

That having been said, that building [SWFC] isn’t a building that could be thought of as a piece of the Chinese fabric 50 or 60 years ago. It’s the result of different forces. And the forces really are global and international. It was designed to house American corporations, Japanese corporations, corporations from all over the world. So there is homogeneity, there’s no doubt about it. But I think the real struggle, or the real hard part of the equation, is to reestablish regional identity in a way that is meaningful. I happen to think Hong Kong does it really well. There’s no place like Hong Kong. You can take a lot of the components and say they’re like a lot of other places, but there’s no place that puts them all together in quite the same way.

It seems like China was growing so fast that these overnight megacities like Shenzhen sprung up full of huge buildings based on an idea of what a skyscraper in a powerful economy is supposed to look like.
Our books have sold more copies in China than in any place in the world. We have three Rizzoli books and a bunch of other books. If you go there, you see a lot of buildings that look like our influence, not in a very profound way, frankly, but that’s all part of the process. Unfortunately, they had a lot of opportunities at a time when they weren’t totally ready for them. That could be said about a lot of people, ourselves included. We did a lot of buildings in the 80s that I don’t think are too good now.

Are there ones that got away, buildings you never got to make?
There are buildings that didn’t get built. The building for Rockefeller Center that we designed didn’t get built. It was a very big disappointment. And there have been other things. But by and large, I don’t have anything that hasn’t been accomplished that I deeply regret.

This is the one, the big wait for me [the SWFC]. I consider that building to be the one I’m most emotionally connected to. It’s certainly far from perfect. No building is perfect. But it’s a building that I feel represents a lot of my own personal sensibility, so I feel very connected to that.