I. M. Pei
Ieoh Ming Pei was a Chinese-American architect. Born in Guangzhou into a Chinese family, Pei drew inspiration at an early age from the garden villas at Suzhou, the traditional retreat of the scholar-gentry to which his family belonged. In 1935, he moved to the United States and enrolled in the University of Pennsylvania's architecture school, but quickly transferred to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Unhappy with the focus on Beaux-Arts architecture at both schools, he spent his free time researching emerging architects, especially Le Corbusier.
After graduating from MIT, Pei enrolled in the Harvard Graduate School of Design where he befriended faculty members Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer, both of whom had formerly taught at the Bauhaus.
Beginning in 1948, Pei worked as an in-house architect for New York City real estate developer William Zeckendorf. In 1955, he established an independent design firm, I. M. Pei & Associates. In 1966, the firm was reorganized as I. M. Pei & Partners, and in 1989 reorganized
as Pei Cobb Freed & Partners. Pei retired from full-time practice in 1990. In his retirement, he worked as an architectural consultant primarily with his sons' architectural firm Pei Partnership Architects.
Pei's first major recognition came with the Mesa Laboratory at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado. His new stature led to his selection as chief architect for the John F. Kennedy Library in Massachusetts. He went on to design Dallas City Hall and the East Building of the National Gallery of Art. He returned to China for the first time in 1975 to design a hotel at Fragrant Hills and, fifteen years later, designed Bank of China Tower, Hong Kong. In the early 1980s, Pei was the focus of controversy when he designed a glass-and-steel pyramid for the Louvre in Paris. He designed the Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center in Dallas, the Miho Museum in Japan, Shigaraki, near Kyoto, and the chapel of the junior and high school: MIHO Institute of Aesthetics, the Suzhou Museum in Suzhou, Museum of Islamic Art in Qatar, and the Grand Duke Jean Museum of Modern Art in Luxembourg.
Pei won prizes and awards in the field of architecture, including the AIA Gold Medal in 1979, the first Praemium Imperiale for Architecture in 1989, and the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, in 2003. In 1983, he won the Pritzker Prize, which is sometimes referred to as the Nobel Prize of architecture.
Childhood
I. M. Pei's ancestry traces back to the Ming dynasty, when his family moved from Anhui to Suzhou. The family made their wealth in medicinal herbs, then joined the ranks of the scholar-gentry. Pei Ieoh Ming was born on April 26, 1917, to Tsuyee and Lien Kwun, and the family moved to Hong Kong one year later. It eventually included five children. As a boy, Pei was very close to his mother, a devout Buddhist, who was recognized for her skills as a flautist. She invited him, but not his brothers or sisters, to join her on meditation retreats. His relationship with his father was less intimate. Their interactions were respectful but distant.Pei's ancestors' success meant that the family lived in the upper echelons of society, but Pei said his father was "not cultivated in the ways of the arts". The younger Pei, drawn more to music and other cultural forms than to his father's domain of banking, explored art on his own. "I have cultivated myself," he said later.
Pei studied in St. Paul's College in Hong Kong as a child. When Pei was 10, his father received a promotion and relocated with his family to Shanghai. Pei attended St. John's Middle School, the secondary school of St. John's University that was run by Anglican missionaries. Academic discipline was rigorous; students were allowed only one half-day each month for leisure. Pei enjoyed playing billiards and watching Hollywood movies, especially those of Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin. He also learned rudimentary English by reading the Bible and novels by Charles Dickens.
Shanghai's many international elements gave it the name "Paris of the East". The city's global architectural flavors had a profound influence on Pei, from The Bund waterfront area to the Park Hotel, built in 1934. He was also impressed by the many gardens of Suzhou, where he spent the summers with extended family and regularly visited a nearby ancestral shrine. The Shizilin Garden, built in the 14th century by a Buddhist monk and owned by Pei's uncle Bei Runsheng, was especially influential. He spoke later of his fondness for the garden's blending of natural and human-built structures.
Soon after the move to Shanghai, Pei's mother developed cancer. She was prescribed opium for pain and assigned the task of preparing her pipe to Pei. She died shortly after his thirteenth birthday, and he was profoundly upset. The children were sent to live with extended family, as their father became more consumed by his work. Pei said: "My father began living his own separate life pretty soon after that." His father later married a woman named Aileen, who moved to New York later in her life.
Education and formative years
As Pei neared the end of his secondary education, he decided to attend university. He was accepted by a number of schools, but enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania. Pei's choice had two roots. While studying in Shanghai, he had closely examined the catalogs for various institutions of higher learning around the world. The architectural program at the University of Pennsylvania stood out to him. The other major factor was Hollywood. Pei was fascinated by the representations of college life in the films of Bing Crosby, which differed tremendously from the academic atmosphere in China. "College life in the U.S. seemed to me to be mostly fun and games", he said in 2000. "Since I was too young to be serious, I wanted to be part of it ... You could get a feeling for it in Bing Crosby's movies. College life in America seemed very exciting to me. It's not real, we know that. Nevertheless, at that time it was very attractive to me." Pei added that "Crosby's films in particular had a tremendous influence on my choosing the United States instead of England to pursue my education."In 1935, Pei boarded a boat and sailed to San Francisco, then traveled by train to Philadelphia. What he found once he arrived differed vastly from his expectations. Professors at the University of Pennsylvania based their teaching in the Beaux-Arts style, rooted in the classical traditions of ancient Greece and Rome. Pei was more intrigued by modern architecture, and also felt intimidated by the high level of drafting proficiency shown by other students. He decided to abandon architecture and transferred to the engineering program at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Once he arrived, however, the dean of the architecture school commented on his eye for design and convinced Pei to return to his original major.
MIT's architecture faculty was also focused on the Beaux-Arts school, and Pei found himself uninspired by the work. In the library he found three books by the Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier. Pei was inspired by the innovative designs of the new International Style, characterized by simplified form and the use of glass and steel materials. Le Corbusier visited MIT in, an occasion which powerfully affected Pei: "The two days with Le Corbusier, or 'Corbu' as we used to call him, were probably the most important days in my architectural education." Pei was also influenced by the work of U.S. architect Frank Lloyd Wright. In 1938 he drove to Spring Green, Wisconsin, to visit Wright's famous Taliesin building. After waiting for two hours, however, he left without meeting Wright.
Although he disliked the Beaux-Arts emphasis, Pei excelled in his studies. "I certainly don't regret the time at MIT", he said later. "There I learned the science and technique of building, which is just as essential to architecture." Pei received his BArch degree in 1940; his thesis was titled "Standardized Propaganda Units for War Time and Peace Time China".
While visiting New York City in the late 1930s, Pei met a Wellesley College student named Eileen Loo. They began dating and married in the spring of 1942. She enrolled in the landscape architecture program at Harvard University, and Pei was thus introduced to members of the faculty at Harvard's Graduate School of Design. He was excited by the lively atmosphere and joined the GSD in.
Less than a month later, Pei suspended his work at Harvard to join the National Defense Research Committee, which coordinated scientific research into U.S. weapons technology during World War II. Pei's background in architecture was seen as a considerable asset; one member of the committee told him: "If you know how to build you should also know how to destroy." The fight against Germany was ending, so he focused on the Pacific War. The U.S. realized that its bombs used against the stone buildings of Europe would be ineffective against Japanese cities, mostly constructed from wood and paper; Pei was assigned to work on incendiary bombs. Pei spent two and a half years with the NDRC, but revealed few details of his work.
In 1945, Eileen gave birth to a son, T'ing Chung, and she withdrew from the landscape architecture program in order to care for him. Pei returned to Harvard in the autumn of 1945, and received a position as assistant professor of design. The GSD was developing into a hub of resistance to the Beaux-Arts orthodoxy. At the center were members of the Bauhaus, a European architectural movement that had advanced the cause of modernist design. The Nazi regime had condemned the Bauhaus school, and its leaders left Germany. Two of them, Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer, took positions at the Harvard GSD. Their iconoclastic focus on modern architecture appealed to Pei, and he worked closely with both men.
One of Pei's design projects at the GSD was a plan for an art museum in Shanghai. He wanted to create a mood of Chinese authenticity in the architecture without using traditional materials or styles. The design was based on straight modernist structures, organized around a central courtyard garden, with other similar natural settings arranged nearby. It was very well received, with Gropius calling it "the best thing done in master class." Pei received his MArch degree in 1946, and taught at Harvard for another two years.