Architect Eli Attia has conceived and designed some of the most critically acclaimed and best recognized tall and large buildings in the world.
Upon moving to Chicago from his native Israel in 1968, Eli joined C.F. Murphy Associates (now Murphy / Jahn).
In 1970, Eli moved to New York and joined Philip Johnson / John Burgee Architects, where he served as Chief of Design for 10 years, until 1979.
Equal parts architect and engineer, Eli brought to Johnson / Burgee three things — advanced technical knowledge of the kind of machines tall and large buildings are; a cultivated architectural sensibility for how to “shape” these buildings to minimize their environmental impacts, maximize their economic efficiencies, and strengthen their aesthetic contributions; and a deeply felt architectural obligation to make urban life better by optimizing all three in his building designs. While at Johnson / Burgee, Eli led the firm to explore the possibilities of shaping as an architectural strategy for unlocking the urban, economic, and aesthetic potential of tall and large buildings.
Eli conceived and designed a series of buildings that have been critically acknowledged as instrumental in redefining the modern skyscraper. Among the most famous of these is Pennzoil Place (1976) in Houston. Pennzoil — which The New York Times selected as the “building of the decade” — was the first skyscraper to break the quintessential “shoe box” form that, under the influence of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, had dominated tall building design since the end of World War II.
Also during this period, Eli conceived and designed the Rev. Robert Schuller’s Crystal Cathedral, a 3,000-seat, all-glass, single-span, single-room structure in Garden Grove, California; and 101 California Place, in San Francisco, the first commercial office building to feature a round footprint.
Shortly after opening Eli Attia Architects in 1979, Eli designed 101 Park Avenue (1979 - 82) for Peter Kalikow. Writing in The New York Times, Ada Louise Huxtable called the 50-story building, which marked the beginning of the modern expansion of Park Avenue south of Grand Central:
“...an exercise in the kind of creative quality that until very recently has been absent from the New York scene...the volume is used to produce the ‘economically efficient’ structure the builder wanted, at the same time that the architect has raised that requirement to notable levels of art and urbanism. Mr. Attia…has produced architecture at its most elegant, controlled, abstract and precise.”
Also in the 1980s, Eli designed the Republic National Bank World Headquarters (1985) — now HSBC — at Fifth Avenue and 40 th Street (for Edmund Safra) and the Millenium Hilton (1989), across from the World Trade Center site (for Peter Kalikow).
For most of the 1990s, Eli was engaged in two high-profile intellectual property lawsuits concerning his 1987 design of the FDR expansion for New York Hospital and his 1992 design of the Shalom Center in Tel Aviv. At issue in both of these potentially precedent-setting cases were creative rights for architectural concept design, which were not — and still are not — protected under U.S. copyright law.
Among the architects who signed a statement on Eli’s behalf, during the New York Hospital case, were Philip Johnson, Peter Eisenman, Frank Gehry, Michael Graves, Richard Meier, and Robert A.M. Stern.
Eli is currently developing a proprietary building technology that promises to revolutionize the design and construction of tall and large buildings by (1) raising both design quality and production quality to the highest levels, while (2) reducing the cost and duration of both design and construction by 20–30%.
Eli is a member of the Steering Group of the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat.
