I. M. Pei

Architect

• Born: April 26, 1917
• Birthplace: Canton (now Guangzhou), China
• Died: May 16, 2019
• Place of death: New York City, New York

Chinese-born American architect

Through his designs for major public buildings, Pei helped shape architectural design in the second half of the twentieth century and is considered the last major architect of the high modernist style. Equally skilled in the conceptual process of design, urban development, and client and community politics, he has completed buildings under complicated and difficult urban situations.

Area of achievement Architecture

Early Life

Ieoh Ming Pei was born to Tsuyie and Lien Kwun Pei in Canton (now Guangzhou), China, in 1917. His father, a prosperous banker, was descended from an ancient family of almost mandarin standing. His banking responsibilities moved the family from Canton to Hong Kong and then to Shanghai, where Pei attended a Western missionary school. Though he passed the entrance examinations for Oxford University in England, Pei insisted, against paternal advice, on attending college in the United States. He entered the University of Pennsylvania in 1935, but he was disappointed with the school's architectural program and soon transferred to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) instead. He received his bachelor’s degree in architectural design from MIT in 1940.

Pei met Eileen (Ai-Ling) Loo, another student from China, in 1938. She was attending Wellesley College for Women (now Wellesley College), but her interest in landscape architecture led to associations with the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD). Through Loo, whom Pei married in 1942, Pei was introduced to the school. He was recruited to Harvard's graduate design program, where he received the support and mentoring of Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer, leading Bauhaus figures who had relocated to the United States due to the outbreak of World War II in Europe. Pei received his master’s degree in 1946, after a brief hiatus spent working with the National Defense Research Committee. The Bauhaus ideals that Gropius and Breuer brought to the United States were critical to his intellectual and architectural development. They taught that architecture was a force for social change and that “authentic” architecture developed its visual forms from its social functions and exploited the most up-to-date technology. In the Bauhaus scheme, architecture was an art of teamwork in which design, engineering, urban planning, and landscape design each played its part.

Pei continued to teach at the GSD until 1948, when he became the in-house architect for William Zeckendorf, a real-estate developer and speculator in New York. This was a risky move, but it gave Pei opportunities unavailable to other young architects. He gained invaluable real-world experience dealing with large-scale projects of urban redevelopment and designed projects in Denver, New York, Montreal, and Washington, DC. During the twelve years of his association with Zeckendorf, Pei learned to design by adapting site and function, and he learned how to cajole, convince, and outlast bureaucratic opposition. He also obtained his US citizenship. In 1955 he put together an architectural team, I. M. Pei & Associates, with which he would work for the rest of his career. His association with Zeckendorf ended in 1960.

Life’s Work

The split with Zeckendorf was a difficult but necessary step in Pei’s development. As long as he remained identified with the entrepreneurial requirements of a single patron, prestigious public commissions and recognition would continue to elude him. Beginning in 1961, a series of early and important clients risked hiring him. In these early independent commissions, Pei showed that he was extremely adept at working personally with his patrons and at the social and bureaucratic maneuvering required to bring controversial programs to completion. With his design for the East Building of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, he became recognized as a major architect whose work was characterized by clean, geometric forms subtly adapted to the particular site, function, and infrastructural needs of the commission.

During its first decade as an independent firm, I. M. Pei & Associates worked on a number of public commissions. Most of these were won by the firm because of Pei’s successful courting of clients who had the power of sole approval. His design for the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR, 1961–67) demonstrated his ability to blend a large (223,220 square feet), multifunction structure with a near-pristine site in the foothills above Boulder, Colorado. Based on both the modernist tradition and pre-Columbian architecture, the building was characterized as both a fortress and a monastery, and it shows Pei’s abiding preference for juxtaposed geometric forms.

Based on the modest successes of the NCAR building, the Luce Memorial Chapel in Taiwan (1954–63), and several university buildings, Pei was selected in 1966 to build the Dallas Municipal Administrative Center. Characteristically, he envisioned the final project as more sweeping than its originators had, and there were enormous cost overruns by the time the building opened in 1977. In true, if lingering, Bauhaus fashion, Pei’s horizontal design and dynamic reflected his concept of appropriate government (democratic and active), and its formal contrast to the many private skyscrapers that it balanced embodied his view of the relationship between the public and the private in the modern metropolis.

Pei's commissions of the 1960s also demonstrated the bureaucratic and technical difficulties that large-scale projects faced. In 1964, Pei was chosen by Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis to design the Kennedy Library and Museum. Though his original design and siting were masterful—it was the first appearance of the glass pyramid in his work—community opposition delayed work for years and eventually forced major changes in both site and design. The building was finally completed in 1979.

The John Hancock Tower in Boston (1966–76), considered by some architectural critics at the time as a fiasco, is now seen as an elegant, defining feature of the Boston skyline. Though not of Pei’s own design, its history significantly affected the firm’s image. I. M. Pei & Partners (its name as of 1966) was inexperienced in skyscraper design when it took on the task, and the Hancock Corporation’s desire to surpass its rival, the Prudential Tower, in height forced the design beyond the specifications of the materials and perhaps beyond the firm’s technical competence. The Hancock building was built with a thin, double-layer glass sheathing that, in 1973, began cracking and, in some cases, falling to the street below. There were also concerns about the building’s overall stability in unusually high winds. Much energy went into settling numerous lawsuits, and Pei’s firm suffered badly. Pei received no large corporate commissions in the United States for almost a decade.

The lasting triumphs of Pei’s career have been in the field of museum design. His reputation was established with the Kennedy project, and numerous art facilities appear on his list of completed projects, including the Everson Museum in Syracuse, New York (1961–68), the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio (1987–95), and museums in Athens, Luxembourg, and Berlin. However, he will remain best known for his designs for the East Building of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC (1968–78), and for the entrance to the Grand Louvre in Paris (1983–89).

The East Building is Pei’s best-known American work. Collaborating closely with donor Paul Mellon and museum experts, Pei created a striking, functional, beautifully sited building that fully embodies his mature style. Clean, almost crystalline geometric forms and a large glass curtain wall create an imposing atrium space, while the exterior defines the urban relations around it. It is one of the most frequently visited buildings in the nation’s capital.

Pei’s design expertise and his skill at bureaucratic maneuvering were fully called upon during the so-called Battle of the Pyramid, as the public and governmental debates surrounding the project for the Louvre Museum in Paris were called. Part of the furor centered on Pei himself, a Chinese-born US citizen designing a cultural monument in the heart of France, and part focused on the audacity of his design. In phase one (1983–89), Pei reworked the necessary infrastructure to house art objects and to serve huge numbers of people, but all of that was concealed underground in the great Cour Napoleon. What appeared to the public was an unforgivingly modern glass pyramid, 116 feet on a side and 71 feet high. Pei patiently outlasted his critics and even survived changes in government. As is typical of his designs, early negative public sentiment about the pyramid has been replaced by almost universal praise. The pyramid of the Louvre has come to stand with the Eiffel Tower as one of the defining features of Paris. Pei undertook phase two, the Richelieu Wing, between 1990 and 1993.

As a mature architect, Pei returned to Asia to blend his modernist vision with local traditions and functions. In addition to the early Luce Memorial Chapel, his Asian commissions include the Oversea-Chinese Banking Corporation Centre in Singapore (1970–76), the Raffles City hotel and office complex in Singapore (1973–86), Sunning Plaza in Hong Kong (1977–82), the Fragrant Hill Hotel in Beijing (1979–82), and the Bank of China Building in Hong Kong (1982–90).

In 1989, Pei reorganized his firm into Pei Cobb Freed & Partners, a move calculated to ease the transition beyond his personal leadership of the company. It also permitted Pei to take on smaller projects as lead designer. Among these were two other Asian works, the Shinji Shumeikai bell tower (1988–90) and the Miho Museum in Shiga, Japan (1997). This museum characterizes Pei's later work, and perhaps all of his work. One of many museum designs, it demonstrates his attention to the function a building serves. It also shows the care and patience with which he worked with clients, in this case Mihoko Koyama. His original plan was adapted many times over as the nature of the collection continued to develop. Also, the Miho represents Pei’s ability to deal with bureaucratic limitations; the museum is sited within a nature preserve, and all design elements had to be harmonious with the needs of this site. As a result, the majority of the square footage of the design is masked underground, but the plan still allows necessary natural light to enhance pieces in the collection. The design epitomizes Pei's adherence to a pure geometry, based as it is on the triangle and tetrahedron (also seen in the Grand Louvre and other creations). Finally, as is true of some of Pei's most sensitive late works, his modernist design is in deep conversation with the traditional architecture of its Asian setting.

Pei continued to work into the twenty-first century, with designs including the Suzhou Museum in China (2002–6); the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha, Qatar (2008); and the Macao Science Center in Macau, China (2006–9), which he designed in association with Pei Partnership Architects, founded by his sons and former employees Chien Chung Pei and Li Chung Pei. The Museum of Islamic Art building blends traditional Islamic architecture with Pei's characteristic modernist sensibility. To create the design, Pei spent months visiting examples of eighth- and ninth-century Islamic mosques and fortresses in Tunisia, Egypt, and elsewhere.

A selection from among Pei’s many honors includes the Thomas Jefferson Medal in Architecture (1976), the Grande Médaille d’or d’Architecture (1981), the Pritzker Architecture Prize (1983), the Medal of Liberty (1986), the Medal of the French Legion of Honor (1988), the Praemium Imperiale of the Japanese Art Association (1989), the Presidential Medal of Freedom (1993), Officier de la Légion d’Honneur (1993), the Henry C. Turner Prize for Innovation in Construction Technology (2003), and the Royal Gold Medal from the Royal Institute of British Architects (2010). He was also made an Officier de la Légion d’Honneur (1993) and named a cultural laureate of the Historic Landmarks Preservation Center of New York (1999).

Pei had three sons and a daughter; two of his sons also became architects, and with them, Pei formed the architecture firm Pei Partnership in 1992. Pei died on May 16, 2019, at the age of 102, at his home in Manhattan.

Significance

Pei made a lasting contribution to the architecture of the twentieth century, not only in the United States but worldwide. His visual elegance and love of modernist geometry was matched by his grasp of urban site planning and his ability to provide adequate infrastructural support for large public projects. In addition, his career is a model of the architect as astute politician.

Pei’s most successful works—NCAR, the National Gallery addition, the Grand Louvre project, and the Miho Museum—express his sculptural sensitivity while fulfilling the functional demands of the commission. His grasp of architecture was so artistic that it is on these art-oriented projects that he excelled. To the extent that his projects have failed, they have done so because the commission could not accept the lofty artistic ideals he imposed on it. Moreover, the team concept that Pei created and sustained changed American architectural practice, if not the practice of architecture around the world.

Bibliography

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