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Initially, Pei’s Louvre Pyramid design was controversial. Sections of the press were vitriolic in their condemnation. Pei, though, had his fans. According to Paul Goldberger of The New York Times, “Even French movie star Catherine Deneuve visited his design studio to lend her support. Later, Mr. Pei recalled, ‘All you need is the support of a dozen people like that.’” Pei’s design was serene. The controversy has long evaporated. He did the Louvre and Paris proud.
Diplomacy and design talent aside, Pei’s great strength was to connect different cultures, to bridge gaps between contemporary and historic architecture, and given his unique background, between East and West, China and the United States, Europe and China.
Ieoh Ming Pei (known as “I. M.”) was born in Canton (Guangzhou) in April 1917. His father, Tsuyee Pei, from a landed background in Suzhou – Marco Polo’s “Venice of the East” – was a high-ranking official with the Bank of China. Pei’s artistic and musical mother, Lien Kwun, had a great love of dreamlike Chinese gardens and mountainside shrines. “I have never forgotten those gardens,” Pei told me. “Wonderful marriages of man-made and natural design. I’ve come back to them again and again.”
There is a delightful black and white photograph of Pei in American Vogue by celebrated fashion photographer Irving Penn. Pei was also pictured showing a sample of the glass made for the Louvre Pyramid to French President François Mitterrand, and he was photographed with Jackie Kennedy, too.
When she was looking to appoint an architect to design the John Fitzgerald Kennedy Presidential Library, Pei was on Mrs. Kennedy’s list. She had not met him before. The architect’s office was on Manhattan’s Madison Avenue, a stylish address. He had the office painted white throughout and placed a single vase of flowers in the lobby. Pei understood his potential client’s taste.
“My, that’s a beautiful bouquet,” Mrs. Kennedy said. “Do you always have those?” “Oh, no,” Pei replied, “we only got those for you.”
Philip Johnson, the hugely connected New York architect, said of Pei: “All his jobs were feats in diplomacy. He performs incredible political footwork that none of the rest of us have any idea about.”
Although the Kennedy Library project was to be mired in arcane planning politics, it brought Pei a flow of enviable projects in its wake, not least the National Gallery of Art – East Building. Fitted into what was seen as a problematic triangular site, Pei’s design was widely acclaimed when, in 1978, its doors opened. President Mitterrand came to see it, his visit leading to Pei’s appointment as architect of the remodeling of the Louvre, the “greatest challenge and the greatest accomplishment,” said the architect of his seven-decade career.
When I. M. Pei visited London in February 2010 to receive the Royal Gold Medal for Architecture, an award personally approved by Queen Elizabeth, I met the world-famous Chinese American architect at the Mandarin Oriental Hyde Park in Knightsbridge. The hotel is owned by a subsidiary of Jardine Matheson Group, the Hong Kong trading house founded in the 1830s, and run by the Keswick family.
The chairman of Jardine Matheson Group, Henry Keswick, and his late wife, Tessa, owned the handsome Georgian Oare House overlooking the Wiltshire Downs. Here, the couple commissioned their very own “Millennium Project,” a concrete, steel, and glass summerhouse pagoda playing on both traditional Chinese and contemporary architectural design. The eye-catching Oare Pavilion is Pei’s one and only British building.
The Royal Gold Medal, he told me, was “a wonderful honor for someone who hasn’t really built here.” The honor, though, was a British appreciation for a lifetime’s international achievement, celebrated again today in the comprehensive I. M. Pei: Life In Architecture exhibition running at the new M+ museum in Hong Kong (until January 5, 2025).
Pei was 92 when we met in London. Immaculately dressed in a tailored suit and tie, charming, modest, and good humored with eyes smiling behind signature tortoiseshell glasses, it was – especially given his considerable design talent – not hard to see why he won such prestigious, career-making commissions. These include: the National Gallery of Art – East Building in Washington, D.C.; the 70-floor Bank of China headquarters in Hong Kong; the Pyramide du Louvre in Paris; and the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha.
These are beautifully crafted fusions of elemental architectural forms and geometry, of traditional patterns, inventive modern design, bravura engineering, and, especially as he grew older, of landscape design informed by Chinese gardens. Such architectural landmarks, says the team at M+, “solidified Pei’s position in architectural history and popular culture. His life and work weave together a tapestry of power dynamics, geopolitical complexities, cultural traditions, and the character of cities around the world.” And of the most effective architectural diplomacy and PR, too.
Qatar’s Museum of Islamic Art was one of Pei’s toughest commissions. Image credit: Shutterstock
The Pei-designed Louvre Pyramid in Paris. Image credit: Shutterstock
Image credit: iStock; Bastille square Paris France Sunny day Winter
Architectural accomplishments
Pei was raised in Canton, Beijing, Hong Kong, and Shanghai, where he attended Saint John’s Protestant missionary school. When a hotel he saw under construction along Shanghai’s waterside Bund area caught his eye, he began to sketch buildings. His father had hopes of his son becoming a doctor, but in 1935, although offered a place at Oxford – a university that says studying medicine because that is what is expected of you is never a good idea – Pei set sail for the United States, where he studied engineering and architecture at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
With the outbreak of World War II, and unable to travel home to China, Pei settled happily in the States, undertaking war service in an engineering firm making fuses for incendiary bombs designed to destroy buildings, working for the U.S. National Defense Research Committee and marrying Ai Ling (Eileen) Loo, an art and botany student who came from a similar Chinese background to his own. They were together for the rest of their lives.
Post-war, Pei enrolled at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design under Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer of Bauhaus fame, before working as the in-house architect for William Zeckendorf, the New York property tycoon. Pei left in 1955 to establish his own Manhattan practice.
Early career progression
I.M. Pei at the Royal Institute of British Architects on the day he received a Royal Gold Medal
Image credit: Shutterstock. Beautiful buildings on Lake Pichola, a large, fresh water man-made lake in Udaipur
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Pei became a contented master of timeless, dignified, and crafted architectural monuments
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There is a delightful black and white photograph of Pei in American Vogue by celebrated fashion photographer Irving Penn. Pei was also pictured showing a sample of the glass made for the Louvre Pyramid to French President François Mitterrand, and he was photographed with Jackie Kennedy, too.
When she was looking to appoint an architect to design the John Fitzgerald Kennedy Presidential Library, Pei was on Mrs. Kennedy’s list. She had not met him before. The architect’s office was on Manhattan’s Madison Avenue, a stylish address. He had the office painted white throughout and placed a single vase of flowers in the lobby. Pei understood his potential client’s taste.
“My, that’s a beautiful bouquet,” Mrs. Kennedy said. “Do you always have those?” “Oh, no,” Pei replied, “we only got those for you.”
Philip Johnson, the hugely connected New York architect, said of Pei: “All his jobs were feats in diplomacy. He performs incredible political footwork that none of the rest of us have any idea about.”
Although the Kennedy Library project was to be mired in arcane planning politics, it brought Pei a flow of enviable projects in its wake, not least the National Gallery of Art – East Building. Fitted into what was seen as a problematic triangular site, Pei’s design was widely acclaimed when, in 1978, its doors opened. President Mitterrand came to see it, his visit leading to Pei’s appointment as architect of the remodeling of the Louvre, the “greatest challenge and the greatest accomplishment,” said the architect of his seven-decade career.
He was thinking of a particular favorite of his mother’s and his own as a boy, the Taoist Lion Grove Garden in Suzhou, with its poetically named, eye-catching buildings: the Standing-in-the-Snow Hall; Faint Fragrance Dim Shadow Tower; and True Delight Pavilion. “They had a lot of time to think about architecture and landscape. Today, we rush everything, but architecture is slow, and the landscapes it sits in even slower. It needs time.”
One of Pei’s final projects, before he finally ran out of time, dying in 2019 at the grand old age of 102, was a Shinto temple in Kyoto, Japan, close to his Miho Museum, which sits half-buried in the rugged, misty landscape of the Shiga mountains. “It will be a fusion of ancient feeling and contemporary design,” he said, as if somehow describing himself.
He was thinking of a particular favorite of his mother’s and his own as a boy, the Taoist Lion Grove Garden in Suzhou, with its poetically named, eye-catching buildings: the Standing-in-the-Snow Hall; Faint Fragrance Dim Shadow Tower; and True Delight Pavilion. “They had a lot of time to think about architecture and landscape. Today, we rush everything, but architecture is slow, and the landscapes it sits in even slower. It needs time.”
One of Pei’s final projects, before he finally ran out of time, dying in 2019 at the grand old age of 102, was a Shinto temple in Kyoto, Japan, close to his Miho Museum, which sits half-buried in the rugged, misty landscape of the Shiga mountains. “It will be a fusion of ancient feeling and contemporary design,” he said, as if somehow describing himself.
Of all the many buildings he and his partners have designed since then, Pei said his toughest ever commission was the Museum of Islamic Art in Qatar, which opened in 2008. How could he possibly distill centuries of Islamic design into one building? He found the answer when he visited the ninth-century Mosque of Aḥmad ibn Ṭūlūn in Cairo. Its age-old geometric forms and precise use of shadows thrown by the baking sun found a new life in Pei’s sharply defined, geometrically bold museum, set on an artificial island off the Doha waterfront.
Pei loved the United States, although as the Post-Modern architect Robert Venturi said, “I. M. Pei will never be happy on Route 66.” He would never be a populist, but became a contented master of timeless, dignified, and crafted architectural monuments that enhanced the cultures of the countries he worked in. And yet, as he told me in the opulent comfort of London’s Mandarin Oriental Hyde Park, “In another life, I might be a gardener.”
The National Gallery of Art – East Building in Washington, D.C. contains small glass pyramids. Image credit: Shutterstock
Masterful design
Pei combined old and new at the Mudam, Luxembourg’s Contemporary Art Museum. Image credit: Shutterstock
A remarkable architectural talent whose work brought together past and present, East and West, I. M. Pei will forever be remembered as the creator of some of the world’s extraordinary buildings.
Slowing Down in Italy
Pei was raised in Canton, Beijing, Hong Kong, and Shanghai, where he attended Saint John’s Protestant missionary school. When a hotel he saw under construction along Shanghai’s waterside Bund area caught his eye, he began to sketch buildings. His father had hopes of his son becoming a doctor, but in 1935, although offered a place at Oxford – a university that says studying medicine because that is what is expected of you is never a good idea – Pei set sail for the United States, where he studied engineering and architecture at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
With the outbreak of World War II, and unable to travel home to China, Pei settled happily in the States, undertaking war service in an engineering firm making fuses for incendiary bombs designed to destroy buildings, working for the U.S. National Defense Research Committee and marrying Ai Ling (Eileen) Loo, an art and botany student who came from a similar Chinese background to his own. They were together for the rest of their lives.
Post-war, Pei enrolled at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design under Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer of Bauhaus fame, before working as the in-house architect for William Zeckendorf, the New York property tycoon. Pei left in 1955 to establish his own Manhattan practice.
A remarkable architectural talent whose work brought together past and present, East and West, I. M. Pei will forever be remembered as the creator of some of the world’s extraordinary buildings.
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