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?!
Those words—“philosophy of living”—stuck with Pei. Four years later, for his thesis, he designed a series of low-cost pavilions. He envisioned them across rural China, hosting exhibitions and films that would combat illiteracy.
Military service came and went. Pei enrolled at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (G.S.D.) for his master’s. In 1944, he placed second in a competition sponsored by the California magazine Arts & Architecture, centered around postwar living. His designs aimed to “vitalize the family as the most important cell of democracy.” Again, Pei was channeling Le Corbusier.
For his final project at the G.S.D., Pei designed a Chinese art museum for the city of Shanghai; its marble-veneer surfaces met meandering courtyards and lightweight wall planes. Though the museum never came to life, Pei’s vision began to be realized in 1955, when he launched his eponymous firm, in New York.
First came the glorious Mesa Laboratory, in Colorado, which was completed in 1967. Then came the J.F.K. library in Massachusetts. In 1980, to the dismay of the Beaux Arts crowd, Pei placed a glass-and-steel pyramid in the courtyard of the Louvre. Three years later, he was awarded the Pritzker Prize—architecture’s equivalent of the Nobel.
Pei retired in 1990, the same year he constructed Hong Kong’s Bank of China Tower. He died in 2019, at age 102. This book, published in conjunction with Pei’s first-ever retrospective, at Hong Kong’s M+, sifts through his life’s work with wonderful photographs and archival material. His reach was astounding. “I don’t think I shall feel strange,” Pei once said, “in a strange land.” —Elena Clavarino
“I. M. Pei: Life Is Architecture” is on view at M+, in Hong Kong, until January 5, 2025
Elena Clavarino is a Senior Editor at Air Mail
