I. M. Pei’s Luce Memorial Chapel, in Taichung City, Taiwan, completed in 1963.

*Top,* the garden plaza of the Bank of China Tower, in Hong Kong, 1989; *above,* a courtyard in the Four Seasons Hotel in New York, 1993.

From the first-floor terrace of the Denon Wing, at the Louvre, in Paris: the Pyramid, 1989.

The suspension bridge leading to the Miho Museum, in Koka, Japan, 1997.

*Top,* the underground café in the National Gallery of Art’s East Building, in Washington, D.C., 1978; *above,* the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha, Qatar, 2008.

The Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art.

An aerial view of the Bank of China Tower.

Architecture’s Philosopher

A new coffee-table book celebrates the life and career of I. M. Pei, the modernist visionary behind Paris’s Louvre Pyramid and Hong Kong’s Bank of China Tower

In 1935, when Le Corbusier was a guest speaker at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 18-year-old Ieoh Ming Pei was in the audience. Pei grew up in wealthy Hong Kong, and like many of his Chinese friends he came to America to study architecture at the University of Pennsylvania. But Penn’s Beaux Arts–centric curriculum and geriatric principles of symmetry and hierarchy bored him. If this was design, he thought, he wanted no part in it. Pei transferred to M.I.T.

As the Swiss-French eminence in rimmed glasses and a dotted bow tie talked modern architecture, Pei found himself mesmerized. Yes, Le Corbusier said, American skyscrapers are grand, but they fail to consider city planning. The Beaux Arts principles had forgotten things like the “philosophy of living.” And what about abstraction?!