I.M. Pei
THE LAST SURVIVING MODERNIST
“Contemporary architects tend to impose modernity on something. There is a certain concern for history but it’s not very deep. I understand that time has changed, we have evolved. But I don’t want to forget the beginning. A lasting architecture has to have roots.” - I.M. Pei
In 1984 the modernist architect Ieoh Ming Pei (1917-2019) presented his design for a 71-foot-tall glass-and-metal pyramid in the 19th-century Cour Napoléon, the main courtyard of the Grand Louvre. Whilst this immense, luminous glass structure would come to be seen a symbolic gateway to the triumphal route, linking the Louvre with the Grande Arche de la Défense, the immediate reaction was outrage; Pei estimated that 90% of Parisians were opposed to his design. Having never before worked on an historic building, Pei was perhaps not the most obvious choice of architect; but the then French president, François Mitterrand (1916-1996), so impressed by one of his earliest museum extensions, the National Gallery of Art (1978) in Washington DC — described by Time magazine as the “masterpiece on the Mall” — that he insisted he was the man for the job. Dubbed the “Battle of the Pyramid”, Pei and Mitterrand were roundly chastised, with one 1985 New York Times story rounding up the criticisms: The pyramid was “an architectural joke, an eyesore, an anachronistic intrusion of Egyptian death symbolism in the middle of Paris, and a megalomaniacal folly imposed by Mr. Mitterrand.”
In his mid-60’s, and already an established star, Pei was unprepared for the strength of the hostility his plans would receive; taking inspiration from Napoleon’s fascination with the pyramids on the Nile, Pei had gone out of his way to ensure his extension did not interfere with, let alone hurt, the original ornamented façades. He considered the Pyramid shape to be the “most compatible with the architecture of the Louvre, especially with the faceted planes of its roofs.” He had won the Pritzker Prize, the “Nobel of architecture”, in 1983, but it did nothing to assuage his detractors. “I received many angry glances in the streets of Paris,” Pei later said, confessing that “after the Louvre I thought no project would be too difficult.” Always a pragmatist, Pei needed all his tact and diplomacy to survive a series of meetings with French officials and historians. In January 1984, at meeting with Paris’s Committee on Historical Monuments, the atmosphere was so fraught that Pei was unable to present his ideas; the structure’s critique vitriolic to the extent that Pei’s translator was apprehensive about explaining to him what was said. “You are not in Dallas now!” one of the experts shouted at him during what he recalled to be a “terrible session”, where he felt the victim of anti-Chinese racism. Tensions continued to escalate to the extent that the Louvre's then director, Andre Chabaud, resigned complaining that Pei’s vision was “unfeasible” and posed “architectural risks”. Today these reactions are almost unfathomable, with Pei’s Pyramid transforming what was a car park into one of the world’s most iconic public spaces.
I.M. Pei, gelatin silver print (1967) by Arnold Newman Photograph: ©Phillips
Perhaps the last living link to his modernist forefathers, Pei’s genius lay in his ability to maintain the sculptural quality of his crisp, angular forms, while achieving a connection to the local landscape through massing and materials. It was never form over function, he believed that architecture should mirror life, and whatever he built, he adapted his architectural language to the context and purpose. His Suzhou Museum (2006) in China, for example, reinterpreted the city’s black-and-white vernacular, while the entrance to his Miho Museum (1997) in Japan — a group of staircases — gives the visitor an almost processional experience, as if entering a Buddhist temple. This same sensitivity can be seen his last great work, the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha, Qatar (2008), an unmistakably Pei building, for which he studied Islam (a culture he did not claim to understand), first by reading a biography of the Prophet Muhammad, and then exploring the great Islamic architecture around world; discovering his cube-and-dome idea in the Ibn Tulun Mosque in Cairo.
Born in in Canton (now Guangzhou), Pei left China aged 17 to study architecture at the University of Pennsylvania, before transferring to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Uninspired by the Beaux-Arts traditions at both schools, he spent his free time researching emerging architects. Le Corbusier visited MIT in November 1935, an occasion by which Pei was powerfully affected: “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 quoted in Conversations with I. M. Pei: Light Is the Key, Gero Von Boehem). After graduating in 1942, with the growing threat of a Communist revolution — and as the son of one of China’s leading bankers — it was too risky for Pei to return to his native China; instead, he followed his wife, Eileen Loo, into Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, where he was mentored by Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus School, and his one-time partner, Marcel Breuer, architect of the Whitney Museum (1966) and the UN Building (1952). In 1948, the flamboyant New York property developer William Zeckendorf, Sr. invited Pei to head the new in-house design team at his New York real estate development firm Webb & Knapp. Pei quickly found himself engaged in the design of high-rise buildings, and he used that experience as a springboard to establish his own firm, I.M. Pei & Associates (later changing its name to Pei & Partners in 1966 and finally to Pei Cobb Freed & Partners in 1989), which he set up in 1955 with Henry Cobb, one of his former students at Harvard and Eason Leonard, whom he had worked with at Webb & Knapp.
A disciple of Le Corbusier's International Style, Pei pioneered apartment towers constructed of reinforced concrete: a future, as he saw it, of beautiful forms with the simple addition of glass. These New York towers, Kips Bay Plaza (1961), Bleecker Street (1966) and LaGuardia Place (1966) in Greenwich Village – notable for their waffle-like concrete facades – quickly became fashionable addresses. Keen to separate himself from his patron, Pei secured a number of outside commissions, including the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse and the Des Moines Art Center, both finished in 1968. When Zeckendorf ran into serious financial difficulties in 1960, Pei saw the opportunity to turn I. M. Pei & Associates into a fully independent practice. It was in 1964, when he was chosen by a still grieving Jacqueline Kennedy to design the John F. Kennedy Library — over Louis Kahn, Philip Johnson, Gordon Bunshaft and Paul Rudolph — that Pei was thrust onto the world stage; no longer seen merely as a developer’s architect, but as an important figure on the international design scene.
Double-sided clock, from the John Hancock Building (1976) by I.M. Pei Photograph: ©Phillips
As his firm grew in size, Pei became an important patron of the arts, becoming friends with Jean Dubuffet (1901-1985), Willem De Kooning (1904-1997) and Barnett Newman (1905-1970), whilst commissioning site-specific works from such modernist luminaries as Miró (1893-1983), Picasso (1881-1973) and Henry Moore (1898-1986). Pei saw a strong correlation between art and architecture, and felt paintings and sculpture brought life into buildings. Indeed he relished museum commissions — each one a unique expression of local culture and identity — for they gave him the opportunity to delve into a countries art historical past. For the East Building of the National Gallery of Art (1978), he was assigned an irregularly shaped, trapezoidal site, across from the National Gallery at the end of the Washington Mall, a space indicated on Pierre L’Enfant’s 1791 street plan. When the plot was initially discussed with Pei, he explained that first he “sketched a diagonal line across the trapezoid and produced two triangles. That was the beginning.” With an isosceles triangle becoming a unifying motif, the interior opens up to a large atrium, bisected by a Piranesi like network of bridges, a gigantic mobile by Alexander Calder rotating at its apex. At the inaugural ceremony, President Jimmy Carter called the design “dignified and daring”.
While Pei was designing the Suzhou Museum, Sir Henry and Lady Keswick contacted him to commission a summer house for gardens of their home, the eighteenth century Oare House, in Wiltshire. Keswick’s family had been acquainted with Pei’s father through their trading interests in China. In the whimsical tradition of the country house folly, the “tea pavilion”, as Pei referred to it, is a two-tiered pyramidal glass structure, expressing one of the architects favorite sayings, “Architecture is geometry modelled by light.” Paula Deitz writing for the Architects Journal sees the Pavillion as a “sister to the performance pavilion in the lotus pond at the Suzhou Museum.” Like the Suzhou Museum, light is filtered through thin wooden slats on the interior of the slanted glass walls. Completed in 2003, although his only work in the UK, it’s one of his best, a true expression of a lifetimes work.
Some thought Pei, with his willingness to use bold, assertive modernism, was deliberately courting controversy; but he didn’t see it that way. Throughout his career he maintained that he wanted not just to solve problems but also to produce “an architecture of ideas,” worrying “that ideas and professional practice do not intersect enough.” When he received his Pritzker Prize in 1983, the jury citation stated that he “has given this century some of its most beautiful interior spaces and exterior forms.” Perhaps something of a contradiction, whilst Pei was known as a true modernist, with a passion for simple geometric forms, triangle, circle, square — on which all of his buildings were based — he rejected the implications of globalism inherent in the “International Style”, instead advocating contextual development and variation in style. He commented that “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.” Pei's prolific contribution to architecture spans the globe and two centuries. He leaves behind a formidable legacy that will continue to influence architects and designers for decades to come.