Chinese-American architect (1917–2019)
People connected to I. M. Pei
He put a glass pyramid in front of the Louvre and the French nearly rioted. Pei built geometry that looked alien until it didn't — then it became the postcard.
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,…
Sourced, dated quotes from I. M. Pei
For me the important distinction is between a stylistic approach to the design; and an analytical approach giving the process of due consideration to time, place, and purpose ...
I believe that architecture is a pragmatic art. To become art it must be built on a foundation of necessity.
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