Suzhou gardens taught the architect of glass pyramids
Ieoh Ming Pei, 26 April 1917 to 16 May 2019, carried scholar-gentry garden memory from Guangzhou and Suzhou into American modernism. Mesa Lab, the Kennedy Library, Louvre glass, and a 1983 Pritzker Prize marked a career that began in banker's Shanghai and Bauhaus Harvard.
Pei's ancestors moved from Anhui to Suzhou in the Ming era, got rich trading medicinal herbs, and rose into the scholar-gentry. Born in Guangzhou in April 1917 to the banker Tsuyee and Lien Kwun, he moved to Hong Kong as a baby and to Shanghai at ten, where he studied at the rigorous missionary-run St. John's Middle School, played billiards and loved Chaplin and Keaton films. Shanghai's Bund and the 1934 Park Hotel impressed him, and summers in Suzhou, especially the fourteenth-century Shizilin Garden owned by his uncle, left a lasting mark. His mother, a Buddhist and gifted flautist, died of cancer soon after he turned thirteen.
In 1935 he sailed to San Francisco and took the train to the University of Pennsylvania, partly lured by Bing Crosby's college films. Put off by its Beaux-Arts classicism and by classmates' drafting skill, he switched to MIT, where the same tradition reigned, but books by Le Corbusier and the architect's own two-day visit in November 1935 won him to modernism. He graduated in 1940 with a thesis on standardised propaganda units for China, married the Wellesley student Eileen Loo in 1942, and joined Harvard's design school, pausing to advise the National Defense Research Committee during the war.
Back at Harvard he befriended the former Bauhaus teachers Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer. From 1948 he designed in-house for the New York developer William Zeckendorf, founding his own firm in 1955. Fame arrived with the Mesa Laboratory for atmospheric research in Colorado, designed in 1961 and finished in 1967, which led to the John F. Kennedy Library, Dallas City Hall and the National Gallery's East Building.
He first went back to China in 1975 for a hotel at Fragrant Hills and later designed the Bank of China Tower in Hong Kong. His glass-and-steel pyramid for the Louvre caused a storm in the early 1980s. Honours included the Pritzker Prize in 1983. He left full-time practice in 1990 and died in May 2019, aged 102.
Source: I. M. Pei
