I. M. Pei

Ieoh Ming Pei was born on April 26, 1917, in Guangzhou, in southern China, into a prosperous banking family ^[1]. His father, Tsuyee Pei, rose to senior positions in the Bank of China, and the family moved with his postings, first to Hong Kong and then, in 1927, to Shanghai ^[2]. The boy spent summers at the family's ancestral home in Suzhou, where the celebrated Lion Grove Garden, with its rockeries, ponds, and framed views, belonged to his relatives. He later credited those gardens with teaching him how buildings, light, and landscape could work together ^[3].

Shanghai in the late 1920s and 1930s was a city of construction cranes. Pei watched the Park Hotel rise near the racecourse, then the tallest building in Asia, and the spectacle helped fix his ambition to design buildings rather than follow his father into finance ^[2]. His mother, Lien Kwun, a devout Buddhist and an accomplished flutist, died of cancer when he was thirteen, a loss he described as the hardest of his youth ^[1].

In 1935, at seventeen, Pei sailed for the United States. He enrolled first at the University of Pennsylvania, but its Beaux-Arts curriculum, heavy on rendering and classical ornament, did not suit him, and within weeks he transferred to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to study architecture, receiving his bachelor's degree in 1940 ^[1].

War in China kept Pei in America after graduation. He entered the Harvard Graduate School of Design in 1942, where the faculty included Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus, and Marcel Breuer ^[2]. He interrupted his studies to work for the National Defense Research Committee in Princeton during the Second World War, then returned to Harvard, completed his master's degree in 1946, and taught there briefly as an assistant professor ^[1]. His thesis project, a museum for Shanghai, already argued that modern architecture could carry regional character rather than erase it ^[3].

In 1948 Pei made an unconventional move for an academic architect: he joined the New York real estate developer William Zeckendorf as in-house architect for Webb and Knapp ^[2]. The job immersed him in large urban projects, budgets, and politics. Over the next decade he produced work such as the Mile High Center in Denver and Kips Bay Plaza in Manhattan, learning to build at city scale ^[4].

Pei formed his own firm, I. M. Pei and Associates, in 1955, the same year he became a naturalized American citizen ^[1]. The practice, later renamed Pei Cobb Freed and Partners, won early distinction with the National Center for Atmospheric Research (1967) in Boulder, Colorado, a cluster of rough concrete towers set against the Rocky Mountain foothills that Pei modeled partly on the cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde ^[4]. In 1964 Jacqueline Kennedy chose him, over more famous rivals, to design the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston, a commission that put his name before the general public even though the building, delayed by site disputes, did not open until 1979 ^[2].

Any account of I. M. Pei achievements begins with museums. The East Building of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, completed in 1978, turned an awkward trapezoidal site on the National Mall into a composition of interlocking triangles in pink Tennessee marble, with a vast skylit atrium at its heart ^[4]. Critics praised its knife-edge corner, worn smooth by visitors who could not resist touching it, and the building confirmed Pei as the leading museum architect of his era ^[2].

His most famous and most contested work came in Paris. In 1983 President Francois Mitterrand selected Pei to reorganize the Louvre, and Pei proposed a 71-foot glass and steel pyramid in the Cour Napoleon as the entrance to a new underground concourse ^[5]. The plan provoked fierce public opposition; opponents called it an affront to French heritage, and Pei later recalled being glared at on Paris streets. When the pyramid opened in 1989 opinion turned, and it became one of the most recognized architectural images of the late twentieth century ^[5].

Other landmarks followed across decades and continents: the John Hancock Tower in Boston (designed in his office by partner Henry Cobb), the Dallas City Hall, the OCBC Centre in Singapore, the Fragrant Hill Hotel outside Beijing, the Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center in Dallas, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, and the 70-story Bank of China Tower in Hong Kong (1990), a faceted glass shaft commissioned by the institution his father had once served ^[1]. In 1983 Pei received the Pritzker Architecture Prize, and he used the 100,000 dollar award to endow a scholarship for Chinese students to study architecture in America on the condition that they return to practice in China ^[6]. His other honors included the AIA Gold Medal (1979), the Presidential Medal of Freedom (1992), and the Royal Gold Medal of the Royal Institute of British Architects (2010) ^[7].

Pei met Eileen Loo, a Wellesley student who later studied landscape architecture at Harvard, soon after her arrival from China, and they married in 1942 ^[1]. The marriage lasted until her death in 2014, a partnership of more than seventy years. Friends described her as his closest adviser and sharpest critic ^[2].

The couple raised four children: T'ing Chung, an urban planner who died in 2003, Chien Chung (Didi) and Li Chung (Sandi), both architects who worked with their father and later formed their own firm, Pei Partnership Architects, and a daughter, Liane, a lawyer ^[1]. The family lived for decades in a townhouse on Sutton Place in Manhattan and kept a country house in Katonah, New York ^[2].

Colleagues and clients remarked on Pei's charm, his round glasses and constant smile, and his skill at winning over committees, patrons, and heads of state. He enjoyed gardening, cooking, and fine wine, and he remained attached to Suzhou and its gardens throughout his life ^[3].

Pei formally retired from full-time practice at Pei Cobb Freed and Partners in 1990, but retirement proved nominal. Working with a small staff, he took on select commissions that interested him personally, many of them outside the United States ^[2].

The late projects rank among his most admired. The Miho Museum (1997), buried in a mountainside near Kyoto and reached through a tunnel and cable-stayed bridge, drew on the Chinese fable of the Peach Blossom Spring ^[4]. The Suzhou Museum (2006) returned him, at 89, to his ancestral city, where he reworked the whitewashed walls and gray tile roofs of local tradition in modern geometry ^[3]. The Museum of Islamic Art in Doha, Qatar, completed in 2008 when Pei was 91, sat on its own man-made island; he prepared for the commission by traveling through the Islamic world to study its architecture, from Cordoba to Cairo ^[5].

Pei celebrated his hundredth birthday in April 2017, marked by exhibitions and tributes at Harvard, MIT, and elsewhere ^[7]. He died in Manhattan on May 16, 2019, at the age of 102 ^[1].

Obituaries across the world ranked Pei among the last towering figures of twentieth-century modernism ^[1]. His signature was geometric clarity: triangles, cubes, and pyramids executed in concrete, stone, and glass with unusual precision. Unlike many contemporaries, he attached that formal rigor to public institutions, so that museums, libraries, concert halls, and city halls carry most of his reputation ^[4].

The Louvre pyramid illustrates the arc many of his buildings followed, from scandal to affection. Structures once denounced as intrusions, in Paris, Washington, and Hong Kong, became symbols of their cities, reproduced on postcards and film ^[5]. The Pritzker jury in 1983 credited him with giving the century some of its most beautiful interior spaces and external forms ^[6].

Pei also occupies a distinct place in the story of Chinese and American exchange. He left China as a teenager, built his career in New York, and returned late in life to design for Beijing, Suzhou, and Hong Kong, insisting that modern architecture in China should grow from Chinese sources rather than imported styles ^[3]. Among basic I. M. Pei facts, perhaps the most telling is the span of his working life: his first major buildings rose in the 1950s and his last opened more than half a century later. Any I. M. Pei biography ends with a body of work still in daily public use, entered each morning by museumgoers, students, and office workers on four continents ^[2].