IM Pei wasn’t just an architect—he was architecture embodied.
When the Chinese-American icon died on 16 May 2019 at the extraordinary age of 102, he left behind one of the world’s most important and impressive collections of buildings. His career spanned the better part of a century, riding the wave of Modernism without plunging into the depths of iconoclasm or egotism, absorbing influences as disparate as Chinese gardens, Anasazi cliff dwellings, and Middle Eastern mosques to create structures that are as understated as they are impactful. “The best of his creations look at once audacious and inevitable,” wrote architecture critic Justin Davidson.
Whether they are found in Paris, Doha or Singapore, Pei’s buildings are always remarkable, but never alien. The same could be said for the man himself. “You think of architects who seem to lead with their ego, and he was never like that,” recalled architect David Childs after Pei’s death. “He was gentle in demeanour but forceful his convictions.”
FROM CHINA TO AMERICA
Born in Guangzhou in 1917, Pei Ieoh-ming grew up in a prosperous family that shifted between Shanghai and Hong Kong. They were members of China’s scholar gentry class—wealthy, well-educated and civic-minded. Pei often spent time with his mother in the Chinese gardens of Suzhou, his family’s ancestral home and a historic bastion of China’s intellectual elite. The experience of those spaces left a deep enough impression on Pei that when he went for university, he opted to study architecture at the University of Pennsylvania.
What he found there was an architectural profession still obsessed with the curlicues and frills of the Beaux-Arts era, which reminded Pei of the heavy colonial influences on The Bund in Shanghai. He was far more interested in the basic geometric principles of architecture, so he switched his major to engineering and transferred to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. There he became fascinated by the work of Swiss architect Le Corbusier, one of the pioneers of the new International Style that called for simple, straightforward forms made of glass and steel.
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