TOP Laureate Ieoh Ming Pei

The 1st

Laureate

Architecture

Ieoh Ming Pei

I M Pei’s pyramid in the courtyard of the Louvre is probably the best-known application of modernity to a historical setting,as well as being among the most audacious. Pei graduated from Harvard as a product of the new humanist line professed by Marcel Breuer and Walter Gropius,going on to establish his own monumental style in the mid-1960s with buildings at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Boulder,Colorado. His practice built many significant public buildings in the US during the 1970s,developing during the 1980s into a global influence with landmark buildings in China,Hong Kong,Japan and Paris as well as America. His versatility and the depth of his practice have enabled Pei to create monumental set pieces in great cities around the world.

Biography

On leaving the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University in 1946 as a product of the new humanist line professed by Marcel Breuer and Walter Gropius,I M Pei chose to work for the New York developer William Zeckendorf,who was then the driving force behind the real estate firm of Webb & Knapp. In 1948 Pei founded the architectural division of Webb & Knapp realising,to the designs of his immediate associate Henry Cobb,the striking 35-storey Place Ville Marie development in Montreal in 1955–56. This cruciform high-rise building pioneered the neo-Miesian modular fenestration that would reappear in Pei’s own Kip’s Bay apartments in New York,1962,and his Society Hill Towers in Philadelphia,1964.
    By 1955 Pei had already established his own separate identity by setting up the office of I M Pei Associates,even though the organisation was still working for Zeckendorf. The ultimate break came in 1964 with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Earth Sciences Center and the National Centre for Atmospheric Research at Boulder,Colorado. The multi-towered form of the latter building established what one can only call Pei’s neo-Kahnian gestalt; a particularly monumental configuration in bush-hammered concrete that would reappear in a different form in the Herbert Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University,Ithaca,New York,completed in 1973.
    By the 1970s the Pei firm was well established with a large number of significant American public buildings coming to fruition,including the Dallas City Hall,1977 and the monumental John F. Kennedy Library completed on Columbia Point,Boston in 1979. While Pei’s other main associate,James Freed,was realising one of the most elegant neo-Miesian buildings to be erected in New York,the self-effacing 88 Pine Street in the Wall Street area,Pei himself was deeply involved in designing the East Wing of the National Gallery of Art in Washington. The success of this building surely led to Pei being awarded the commission for the reconstruction of the Louvre in Paris in 1983. Pei’s glass pyramid erected on the axis of the Cour Napoleon in 1989 again reflected the architect’s lifelong fascination with space frame construction,which had already made its presence felt in the Kennedy Library and the National Gallery. At the Louvre a space frame in the form of a pyramid became the entire work,making the actual entrance into the museum somewhat constrained. Nonetheless,the pyramid was an architectonic tour de force,a dematerialised assembly of glazed diamonds and triangles held in place by an elegant system of wire cables.
    Two works were to take Pei back to China: the Fragrant Hill Hotel built outside Beijing in 1982 and the Bank of China in Hong Kong,1990. Despite the eclectic approach of I M Pei Associates,it is hard to name two other buildings by Pei himself that are so categorically opposed in their basic format and ethos. If the courtyard garden of the hotel returned Pei to the magic of his childhood experiences in the aristocratic gardens of Suzhou,the Bank of China was a high-tech,high-rise work,a space frame structure in itself and a symbolic rival,so to speak,to Norman Foster’s Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank. Paradoxically,given the aggressive high-rise stance of the Bank of China with its oversize tower curiously poised on an almost sepulchral podium,Pei persuaded the Chinese Republic not to build a high-rise hotel close to the Forbidden City. Instead he suggested building a low-rise hotel for prestigious guests of the government in a former hunting reserve well outside the capital. Conceived as an object lesson in the modernisation of the Chinese tradition,Fragrant Hill ended up as a unique piece of both vitality and calm within the overall trajectory of Pei’s architecture.
    Almost inevitably given the era of Pax Americana in which he worked,Pei’s entire career has been subject to the ethos of the new monumentality,with the result that his most memorable pieces – the Kennedy Library,the Washington National Gallery,the Louvre Pyramid and even the Bank of China – were all to serve as monumental set pieces within their respective cities. However,with the single exception of the Louvre pyramid,they are also all works which,on close inspection,seem to be tenuously divided between the monumentality of their form and the dematerialisation of their roof structure.
 Kenneth Frampton

Chronology

1917
Born April 26,Canton,China
1935
Leaves for the United States to attend the Massachusetts Institute of Technology after having lived in Hong Kong and Shanghai
1940
Receives a Batchelor of Arts degree from MIT
1942
Enrolls in the Harvard Graduate School of Design and studies under Walter Gropius. Married Eileen Loo. Thier family eventually included three sons and one daughter
1946
Completed Master of Architecture at Harvard Graduate School of Design. Simultaneously teaching on the faculty as assistant professor (until 1948)
1948
Formed the partnership of I M Pei & Associates which became I M Pei and Partners in 1966
1951
Awarded the Wheelwright Travelling Fellowship by Harvard. Traveled extensively in England,Fance,Italy and Greece
1954
Became a naturalized citizen of the United States
1961
Started design for National Center of Atmospheric Research in Boulder,Colorado (completed 1967)
1965
Started design for the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston (completed in 1979)
1968
Started design for the East Building of the National Gallery of Art in Washington (completed 1978)
1979
Received the AIA Gold Medal,the highest architectural honor in the United States
1983
Pei is chosen as the Laureate of the Prizker Architecture Prize,uses the $100,000 award to establish a scholarship fund for Chinese students to study architecture in the United states (with the strict proviso that they return to China to practice their profession)
1989
Awarded the Praemium Imperiale Prize for Architecture,Japan Art Association,Tokyo
2019
Died May 16 at his home in Manhattan
  • National Centre for Atmospheric Research

  • John F Kennedy Memorial Library

  • National Gallery of Art

  • Le Grand Louvre

  • Approach to Miho Museum of Art

National Centre for Atmospheric Research
Boulder, Colorado, USA, 1961-67. Photo: Ezra Stoller. ©Esto

John F Kennedy Memorial Library
Boston, Massachusetts, USA, 1965-79.©Thorney Lieberman

National Gallery of Art
East Building, Washington D.C. ©The Sankei Shimbun

Le Grand Louvren
Paris, France. ©The Sankei Shimbun

Approach to Miho Museum of Art
Shiga, Japan, 1997. ©Kiyohiko Higashide