Stainless-Steel Tower Planned for Costa Mesa : Architecture: Cesar Pelli’s design features a curving facade and a coppery glow. The Segerstrom family and IBM are jointly developing the building near South Coast Plaza.

Orange County will add an unusual new building to its skyline--which some critics have called boring and mundane--with the addition next year of a 21-story, stainless steel office tower near South Coast Plaza that was designed by renowned architect Cesar Pelli.

Pelli, who recently designed what could become the world’s tallest skyscraper in Chicago, Tuesday unveiled a model of the new Costa Mesa building, which is being jointly developed by the Segerstrom family and IBM Corp.

The design has a curving facade of burnished steel facing inward toward a parking garage and walkway on one side. On its other side, the design presents a flat surface to passing motorists on Avenue of the Arts. The stainless steel, an unusual material for an office tower, is designed to give off a warm, coppery glow.

Construction is scheduled to begin in May and be completed in September, 1991. While it looks thoroughly modern, the design’s details allude to the look of older office buildings.

Pelli, who lived in Los Angeles in the 1960s and 1970s and designed many buildings there, is one of the foremost architects in the nation. He is probably best known for designing graceful and daring skyscrapers in big cities. This will be his first building in Orange County.

In the 1970s and 1980s, the county’s cityscape changed, from a low-slung suburb of single-family homes and one-story commercial buildings into a series of small urban areas where mid-rise office towers of 10 to 15 stories spring up in spiky clumps around malls or John Wayne Airport. One of these areas grew up around South Coast Plaza, the giant mall that became Costa Mesa’s “new downtown” and that will be the new building’s neighbor.

Many of the new county buildings were boxy, glass structures with few distinguishing features, a result of the Modernist school of architecture that favors sleek, stark buildings with clean lines. These buildings often had the advantage of being cheaper to build than more elaborate designs too.

But in the last 20 years or so, such Post-Modernist architects as Pelli have experimented with different building materials--more expensive stuff such as granite, for instance--and more complicated designs that often incorporate elements of earlier buildings, such as the soaring, big-city skyscrapers of the 1920s.

Most of these new buildings, of course, have been built in such cities as New York, Los Angeles and Chicago. But lately they have been appearing more frequently in such previously undistinguished suburban markets as Orange County and Tysons Corner, Va., outside Washington.

Still, the county’s architecture has drawn little praise to date. For instance, the architecture critic of the New York Times, Paul Goldberger, complained in a 1988 article that the county’s architecture “celebrates not the whimsy of Disneyland, but the conformity of glass boxes and other architectural banalities.”

The county’s biggest developers have begun hiring architects such as Pelli to design their own buildings for reasons both aesthetic and economic:

* A building with an architectural pedigree is easier to rent to the classy tenants that landlords like, especially in an overbuilt office market such as Orange County’s.

* There are so many office buildings in the county now that a building with a distinctive look may be easier to market.

And there are some less tangible benefits: A developer such as the Irvine Co.’s Donald L. Bren, for instance, has a vision of how his vast landholdings should look and hires the best architects to make it so; there is also some civic-mindedness and a healthy dose of ego and one-upmanship involved in hiring prominent architects, local realty observers say.

Few developers are quite so blunt as to acknowledge this, though, or to criticize each other’s buildings.

“This building is a little more daring, a little more creative than we’ve seen,” said Henry T. Segerstrom, whose family owns South Coast Plaza and much of the land around it. “Orange County is at the stage where we need an identity, something very exceptional.

“This is not a mediocre community, and we want to elevate our standards of design.”

Working in the suburbs is often a new experience for such architects as Pelli. He said he did not tone down his imaginative ideas for the conservative county, although he acknowledged that he might have settled on a different building in Los Angeles.

“Every building must be part of its environment,” Pelli said. “Architecture is the art of intelligent and creative response to that environment. But no, we didn’t tone it down.”

Pelli is the latest in a string of renowned architects to work in Orange County. Philip Johnson and John Burgee designed TV minister Robert H. Schuller’s Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove. Helmut Jahn of Chicago is designing a small headquarters building in Dana Point for developers David Stein and Barry Brief.

Pelli ranks with such glittering names. Born in Argentina 63 years ago, he was educated in Argentina and at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He worked for several firms in Los Angeles before becoming dean of the School of Architecture at Yale University in 1977. He left in 1984. He now designs buildings through his firm, Cesar Pelli & Associates in New Haven, Conn.

Among the more prominent buildings Pelli has designed are:

* A building that will be the world’s tallest if built, just approved for 125 stories by Chicago’s City Council. It is to be 15 stories higher than Chicago’s Sears Tower, now the world’s tallest building.

* The big 777 Tower at Citicorp Plaza in downtown Los Angeles.

* The Pacific Design Center in West Hollywood.

* The expansion of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

* The World Financial Center in New York City.

* Norwest Center in Minneapolis.

IBM is a big enough tenant--especially in a slow office market--to demand a piece of the ownership, so Segerstrom and IBM are partners in the building.

Like Segerstrom, IBM has a history of hiring prestigious architects. In this case, the company has a practical objective too: The computer manufacturer is the largest tenant in Segerstrom buildings around South Coast Plaza and wanted to consolidate its offices and save on rent by building a new tower.

Originally, the building was to have been part of Segerstrom’s giant Home Ranch project a mile or so north of the mall off the San Diego Freeway. But that project was killed by Costa Mesa voters.

That building was planned as considerably taller, at 32 stories. The new building, much closer to the mall at the northwest corner of Avenue of the Arts and Anton Boulevard, would be just 21 stories, because of the proximity of flight paths around John Wayne Airport.

Pelli, who often designs much taller buildings, said he did not feel constrained by the relative smallness of the Segerstrom building. It will still be one of the tallest buildings in the county.

IBM will occupy the first eight floors or so--about 160,000 of the 440,000 square feet--and Segerstrom will lease the rest to tenants. IBM, unlike many big tenants in office buildings, says it does not put a big corporate sign on its buildings and will not on this one, saying it prefers not to distract from the architecture.

While neither partner will comment, the building is expected to cost at least $90 million, based on current construction costs, and probably more because of the stainless steel’s expense.

SEGERSTROM-IBM PROJECT

Location: Northwest corner of Anton Boulevard and Avenue of the Arts

Height: 21 stories

Square footage: 440,000

Start date: May, 1990

Completion: Sept.,1991

Architect: Cesar Pelli

Construction: Peck/Jones

Cost: Not disclosed

Financing: Bank of America

Major tenant: IBM Corp.--33%