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A Highly Designed Design Complex Gets a New LifeFrom the moment it opened in 1975, Cesar Pelli's massive and daring Pacific Design Center, with its almost startlingly blue glass exterior, became an instant icon, looming over the surrounding small houses and shops and helping to give this neighborhood, which was incorporated as a city in 1984, a distinct identity.
But for much of its history, the so-called blue whale - 135 feet high, 245 feet wide and 530 feet long, with 750,000 square feet of showroom space for furniture and fabrics - has also been viewed as a gorgeous fortress, off limits to all but the rarefied world of high-end interior designers and their well-heeled clients.
A sister building of brilliant green glass, also designed by Mr. Pelli, was completed in 1988, but it had trouble attracting tenants, never becoming more than half full. And in the 1990's, as a design district began springing up in the area surrounding the design center, even the blue whale itself seemed precariously close to turning into a white elephant. Both buildings, however, have recently been revived.
In 1999, Charles Steven Cohen, president and chief executive of the Cohen Brothers Realty Corporation, a New York real estate company, together with Cheslock-Bakker Associates, a private investment firm in Stamford, Conn., bought the Pacific Design Center for about $157 million from the
more: www.nytimes.com/2004/06/30/busine... (87)
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