I.M. Pei, one of the most distinguished architects of his time, has died. He was 102.
Architect I.M. Pei speaks after being honored with an Ellis Island Family Heritage Award at the Ellis Island Museum in New York City in 2004.
Pei, who won the coveted Pritzker Architecture Prize in 1983, had a client list that was a who's who of 20th century notables, including French President François Mitterrand for the Louvre, Jacqueline Kennedy for the John Fitzgerald Kennedy Library in Boston and art collector and philanthropist Paul Mellon for the East Building of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.
“He knew who he was. He knew he had had an important career. He was proud of his work,” UCLA architecture and history professor Thomas Hines said. “On the other hand, he didn't have that overriding ego that so many architects of his stature have had.”His determination to see a project through to what he thought it should and must be was perhaps most sorely tested at the Louvre, a project he reluctantly accepted.
Pei chose a pyramid, which because of its structural stability could be built to be transparent and light. But Mitterrand did not waver. Construction of the pyramid proceeded, and when it opened in 1988, it was not only Mitterrand who declared it “a thing of beauty that will be inscribed forever in our history.” In a remarkable turnaround, the French public overwhelmingly embraced it. Pei, to his astonishment, was a virtual national hero.
Pei left China in 1935 for the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Within weeks, fearing he could not execute the drawings he thought necessary for architecture, he moved on to MIT to study engineering. He later switched back to architecture at MIT, where he earned his bachelor's degree in 1940.
Harvard at the time was a treasure house of mentors for architecture and design. Walter Gropius, the “form follows function” founder of the Bauhaus architectural school in Germany, was chairman of the Graduate School of Design. While the facility was under construction, Pei won the commission for the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston. Being chosen by Jacqueline Kennedy, the widow of the president who had been assassinated in 1963, was a coup for Pei. But the library would be fraught with problems, going through several designs for several different sites over a decade.
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