Modernist Maverick: The Architecture of William L. Pereira
Nevada Museum of Art
160 West Liberty Street, Reno
Through October 13

Labeling William Pereira as a maverick is the first surprise in the    

Not exhaustive, the exhibit focuses on five projects that capture the broad strokes of Pereira’s multi-faceted career. They include his own house in Hancock Park, but also the plan of an entire new town and university in Irvine, California, which addressed the shortcomings of garden-variety suburbia. He could create singular riveting architectural statements (such as San Francisco’s Transamerica pyramid and the reverse-pyramid of UC San Diego’s Geisel Library), and yet the planner in him was always compelled to integrate these icon-landmarks with their surroundings. And in Pereira’s farsighted early concepts for LAX (with then-partner Charles Luckman, implemented with joint collaborators Welton Becket Associates and Paul R. Williams), the technological complexities of jet travel are blended with a truly modern public architecture.

So Pereira is not just a conventional corporate architect at the beck and call of industry. In each of these projects he uses his confident insider status to push back boundaries. A trip to Reno to see the exhibit is made entirely worthwhile by the original black plastic model of the unbuilt 1,000-foot-tall ABC headquarters in Manhattan, which became an early study for the Transamerica pyramid. Its asymmetrical play of office floors and elevator cores, of served and servant spaces, explain how Pereira was pushing modernism forward at a critical time in its history.

Pereira’s innovations become clear in the accessible exhibition design by Nikolaus Hafermaas and    

Key to this accessibility is the inclusion of art, mostly commissioned for the installation. Several artists stretch and reimagine Pereira’s forms, iconography, and concepts in ways that that give us new perspectives on the architecture—literally. The Transamerica pyramid, a form almost too well known, is made startlingly fresh by Ball-Nogues Studio’s stunning four-story model rendered in ball chains and hanging upside down in the museum’s open stairwell. Deborah Aschheim’s luminous white plastic models reinvigorate the modern sculpted shapes of the Theme Building and a preliminary Transamerica Tower design, while her drawings of the UC Irvine campus in the throes of 1960s student rebellion undermine the conventional screed that Pereira produced futuristically lifeless designs.

Of course, Pereira’s accomplishments go beyond these five buildings. There were innovations in modern urban recreational venues (Marineland of the Pacific), retail architecture (several superb Robinsons department stores), and modern communications facilities (CBS Television City). These and others are represented in a timeline that graphically links major themes in his life and work, as well as providing in-depth material via icons that link to further material through visitors’ smart phones.

With LACMA proposing to demolish its original Pereira campus, we’ve seen attempts to downplay his significance. This exhibit demonstrates what little justification there is for that opinion. The Pereira shown here was an innovator, a builder, a doer, often visionary, and certainly a major shaper of modern twentieth century cities.

Modernist Maverick clearly establishes, with fresh and needed scholarship, that Pereira was a major architect. Above all, Modernist Maverick is a ringing reminder that we don’t know everything we think we do about the history of modern architecture. Though the Nevada Museum of Art may be on the outer fringes of the San Francisco–Los Angeles museum axis, it has produced an extraordinarily important exhibit and catalog.