Editor’s Note: Aric Chen is curator-at-large at M+, a new museum of visual culture under construction in Hong Kong, and professor of practice at Tongji University’s College of Design & Innovation in Shanghai.
CNN
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I.M. Pei, who died Thursday at the age of 102, was an architect of singular vision. One of the great figures of 20th century modernism, he was perhaps best known for his powerful use of geometry. He employed it to create forms and spaces of exquisite refinement, from his glass pyramid at the Louvre in Paris to the East Building of the National Gallery of Art in Washington.
He brought to his work the notion that good architecture served a higher civic purpose. But at the same time, Pei was an architect of multiple dimensions.
00:48 - Source: CNN
See some of I.M. Pei's most iconic buildings
He did not plan to stay in the US when he arrived from China to study in 1935. His thesis projects at MIT and Harvard – a mobile media and recreation center for rural China and a modern art museum for Shanghai, respectively – signaled his intention to return to his native country.
Nevertheless, war and upheaval got in the way. Pei and his wife Eileen Loo, a Harvard classmate, would call New York home for the rest of their lives.
Famously charming, with dapper style and a beaming smile, Pei easily straddled, and found clients in, the worlds of both culture and commerce. However, success did not always come easy.
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Architect I.M. Pei has died at the age of 102. Here, he's seen in 1985 with an architectural model of the Louvre Pyramid in Paris. Click through the gallery to see his life and work in pictures.
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A Christian chapel on the campus of Tunghai University in Taichung, central Taiwan, the Luce Memorial Chapel is named after an American missionary who traveled to China in the late 19th century. Completed by Pei, working with Chen Chi-Kwan, in 1963, its walls are made of reinforced concrete, designed to withstand earthquakes and typhoons.
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Completed in 1978, Dallas City Hall is the seat of Dallas's municipal government. Pei designed the building as an inverted pyramid, with public areas on the lower floors, and office space on the upper floors. His idea was that visitors should be able to access the attractive spaces in the lower stories easily, without having to navigate through a maze of offices.
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When I.M. Pei met John F Kennedy's widow, Jacqueline Kennedy, in 1964, he explained that as a relatively young architect, he did not have experience of working on monumental projects. Nonetheless, Kennedy thought Pei was so filled with promise and imagination, that she chose him -- from a list that included American's best-known architects -- to design her late husband's library. The library, which was finished in 1979, consists of a stark white, nine-story tower, with a contiguous, geometric, light-filled, glass-and-steel pavilion.
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Pei designed the modernist, wedge-shaped East Building of the National Gallery of Art in Washington to fit into its tricky, trapezoid-shaped site. To create visual harmony, Pei built the exterior with the same pink marble -- dug from quarries in Tennessee -- that was used to construct the museum's older West Building. The East Building opened in 1978.
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Made of glass segments and metal poles, I.M Pei's stunning pyramid serves as the public entrance to Paris's Louvre Museum. Situated in the Cour Napoléon, the main courtyard of the Louvre Palace, it is surrounded by three smaller pyramids. Since it opened to the public in 1989, the pyramid has become a much-loved Paris landmark.
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A photo taken on July 28, 1988 shows a general view of the construction site of the Louvre Pyramid.
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The Bank of China Tower, which houses the headquarters of the Bank of China (Hong Kong) Ltd, is one of the most distinctive skyscrapers in central Hong Kong. Completed in 1990, its four triangular towers were inspired by bamboo plants, which represent prosperity and revitalization in Chinese culture.
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The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, which rises above the shore of Lake Erie in downtown Cleveland, Ohio, opened its doors in 1995. Despite knowing little about rock and roll, Pei designed a building that captures the drama of the music, with bold, pyramidal forms anchored by a 162-foot tower.
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The Miho Museum, named after its founder Koyama Mihoko, stands on a forested hill in a nature reserve near the town of Shigaraki, southeast of Kyoto. Completed in 1996, the museum offers sweeping views of the surrounding hills. The walls and floor are made of French limestone -- the same material used by Pei in the entrance hall of the Louvre Museum in Paris.
Kerun Ip, Courtesy of Pei Partnership Architects
Although I.M. Pei grew up mostly in Hong Kong and Shanghai, he was born in Suzhou, so the commission to design the Suzhou Museum had unique personal resonance. Pei chose to combine his modern, geometric, architectural hallmarks with elements of traditional Chinese design. The museum has whitewashed walls and a gray roof, and a large Chinese garden with an artificial pond. Inaugurated in 2006, it houses a collection of Chinese paintings, calligraphy, arts and crafts, and excavated artifacts.
Courtesy of the Museum of Islamic Art and Pei Partnership Architects
In the mid 2000s, I.M. Pei -- by then in his late eighties -- was coaxed out of retirement to design the Museum of Islamic Art in the Qatari capital, Doha. Pei embarked on a world tour to learn about Muslim architecture and history. Having visited Spain, Tunisia, Syria and India, it was the austerity and simplicity of the ablutions fountain at the 9th century Mosque of Ahmad Ibn Tulun in Cairo, Egypt, that inspired his vision. Built on an artificial island, the museum is clad with creamy limestone that captures the changes in light and shade during the day.
Courtesy of the Museum of Islamic Art and Pei Partnership Architects
The museum's 164 foot atrium, hidden from view outside by the walls of a central tower, is crowned with an oculus that captures light from the desert sun and reflects it in patterns on the facets of the dome's walls.
Before seducing Paris, he utterly scandalized the city with his proposal for a glass pyramid at the Louvre, a then-radical proposal for a site seen by many as representing the soul of France. (And by a Chinese-American architect, no less!) His John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston was, for years, mired in controversy, and he considered the construction of the Fragrant Hill Hotel outside Beijing – one of the first buildings designed by an international architect in reform-era China – to be one of the most painful experiences of his professional life.
But with these projects, and others, Pei sought timelessness and, at this point, it seems fair to say he achieved it.
He did so, often, by forging his own path. A student of the revered Bauhaus architects Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer while at Harvard, Pei broke with his profession’s gentile conventions when, in the late 1940s, he dared to start his career working for a real estate developer: the brash, larger-than-life William Zeckendorf.
Along with a formidable assortment of colleagues and collaborators, he also pioneered new construction techniques, especially in concrete. Later in life, with buildings like the Miho Museum outside Kyoto and the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha, he deftly translated his modernist vocabulary into different cultural contexts, and perhaps nowhere more so than in China.
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The Louvre Pyramid in Paris, designed by Chinese-American architect I.M. Pei.
Pei returned to China for the first time in 1974 as part of a delegation of American architects. Soon thereafter, officials asked Pei to design a modern high-rise hotel in central Beijing – an aspirational gesture for the then-impoverished nation.
Concerned about the effect such a building would have on the capital’s historic character, Pei refused. Instead, he selected a site on the city’s wooded outskirts and produced a low-rise complex, the Fragrant Hill Hotel, whose white walls and relationship with its landscape were inspired by the classical architecture and gardens of Suzhou, the Pei family’s ancestral home. (There, the architect would later design perhaps his best project in the country, the Suzhou Museum.)
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Suzhou Museum, designed by Chinese-American architect I.M. Pei, in Suzhou in China's eastern Jiangsu province.
Pei always referred to himself as an American architect, but he never forgot that he was also Chinese. Perhaps this dual sense of identity helped him operate so fluidly in multiple worlds.
I had the good fortune of meeting Pei, though only once, when he was a sprightly 95-year-old. I simply wanted an interview. But against the better judgement of his son, he insisted that we have lunch beforehand at his old haunt, the Gramercy Tavern in Manhattan.
Lunch with Pei, I learned, always meant plenty of good wine, and this time was no exception. The interview suffered as a result, but, true to Pei’s reputation, it was a pleasure nonetheless.