I. M. Pei

Born in Guangzhou in 1917, Pei grew up around the scholar gardens of Suzhou before moving to the U.S. in 1935, bouncing from Penn to MIT in search of something beyond Beaux-Arts tradition. At Harvard he found it, studying under Gropius and Breuer, former Bauhaus masters who taught him modernism's clean lines. He spent over a decade as an in-house architect for a New York developer before launching his own firm in 1955. The Mesa Laboratory in Colorado in 1967 made his name; the Kennedy Library and the National Gallery's East Building cemented it. He returned to China in 1975 after decades away, eventually designing the Bank of China Tower in Hong Kong. The Louvre pyramid in the early 1980s sparked fury and became his most famous work. He won the Pritzker Prize in 1983 and kept building - concert halls, museums on three continents - until he stepped back in 1990, consulting quietly until his death in 2019 at 102.