HAIL CESAR

By Roger Bloom

He sits in a musician’s chair on the stage of the Ren & #233;e and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall, which will open that night.

The hall, built to provide flawless acoustics for the works of Mozart, Beethoven and other composers classical and modern, is filled with the buzz of sanders and drills and the crackle of a welding torch.

As he speaks, his eyes meet the interviewer’s, communicating an easy warmth, intelligence and humor; but they also wander often, drawn to the enormous space and the sweeping interior of the building that encloses it.

His building.

Cesar Pelli has been an architect for more than four decades. His works dot the globe, ranging from the spectacular Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to a private home in Pebble Beach, and including office buildings, libraries, research centers, museums and transportation centers.

His is one of the most recognizable names in modern architecture and his legacy is secure for the next century or more.

And yet, here in Costa Mesa, he is as wide-eyed and excited as a child at Disneyland. Or, he says, a new father looking through the glass of the maternity ward nursery.

“I couldn’t be happier,” Pelli said in a quiet but excited voice. “Seeing a building being finished is like seeing a child being born. There’s the same sense of fulfillment, of happiness, of promise for the future.”

Pelli, the architect behind the stainless steel Plaza Tower and the recent expansion of the South Coast Repertory theater,both a short walk from the new concert hall,said he has designed for the future of Orange County.

“Orange County is a peculiar place. In general, there is no center,” said Pelli, who moved to Southern California in 1964 and was based here for some time before relocating to the East Coast.

His firm, Pelli Clarke Pelli, now is based in Connecticut.

“I’m excited that what’s happening here is a center is now emerging,” he said. “Not a government center, but a commercial and cultural center. To me that’s extremely important. I’m a very urban person. I believe in the virtues of urbanity. This will give the people of Orange County some of the beauty and magic of an urban area.”

He notes the new public plaza, the concert hall, theater and the park-like lawn beyond that’s bordered by the Westin hotel and Plaza Tower create “different depths of public use that is part of the beauty of a city.”

“That’s what makes New York so fantastic,” he said. “Central Park is completely free and it goes up to some very expensive places at the other end of the scale.”

As for the new hall,like a new baby, the center of everyone’s attention right now,Pelli said his overriding concern was that classical music, more than any other, is dependent on acoustics. A classical concert hall, he said, “is more like a musical instrument than a building,an instrument for which much of classical music has been composed.”

“If you make it too different, it will be useless,” he said. “You need to create an instrument suitable to playing that music and at the same time give a feeling that this is a new place, welcoming to new music.”

The new hall is designed to be “beautiful, welcoming, with great acoustic and sight lines, but most of all a place to support the experience of producing and listening to music.”

Orange County’s new concert hall is, according to Pelli, a project that fits right in with the current “golden age” of architecture.

“The spirit of architecture,the basic act of creation,remains the same as always,” he said. “What has changed dramatically (in my lifetime) are the means and all the processes and projects we are doing. Clients and the public are more in tune with architecture, more interested in beautiful buildings, rather than just utilitarian structures In many ways, clients have changed more than architecture itself.”

This new appreciation of design “is not just for special, cultural buildings,” he said, citing Plaza Tower.

“People who retain us for office or commercial buildings want something well beyond simple utilitarian buildings,” he said.

“There have always been some exceptional projects and some exceptional architects,” he said, historically confined to the world’s major cities, New York, Paris or London.

“Now, it’s happening everywhere, in third- or fourth-tier areas,” Pelli said. “We’ve done major projects in Madison, Wis., and Dayton, Ohio. The volume now is huge.

“It makes everyone stretch to do greater work (Frank) Gehry has been the model for clients and architects who are trying to stretch.”

Pelli paused to gaze again around the vast space enclosed on three sides by soft white and blond wood curves that seem to emanate from the huge vertical, burnished metal organ pipes that loom over the stage and dominate the view from the seats.

Years of planning, design and construction had come to fruition,almost.

Pelli looked ahead to the opening that night, saying, “A building is not complete until it is used, until people are in it. A building is not glass and steel and stone, but rather the experience of the people in it.”