Gesture and Response

At the National Arts Club, told tales from his fifty-year-long career like he was swapping stories with colleagues over cocktails: of his youthful hockey coach John Mariucci and one-time teammate Herb Brooks (of “Miracle on Ice” fame); his first job out of MIT at I.M. Pei’s office and initial skepticism at Pei’s parti for the National Gallery (“no compromises,” Pei told him); and his hiring by Gene Kohn at John Carl Warnecke’s office where he’d meet Sheldon Fox, prompting the formation of Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates (KPF).

But Pedersen didn’t give a plotted biography and instead focused on the firm’s efforts to tackle the office tower, what he called “the fundamental building block of the modern city.” The presentation was marked by an eerie continuity, one long march of steel and glass stretching from 1982’s 333 Wacker Drive to the 2019 completion of Hudson Yards. KPF’s early PoMo phase projects was sadly overlooked. (“We tried using a classical language [for] buildings to connect with one another. If only one building does that, it’s sort of a nice building, but …