I.M.Pei is one of the last and certainly the most accomplished of the architects trained by Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design. (The best known of the others are Edward Larrabee Barnes, Philip Johnson, and Paul Rudolph.) In a career spanning more than half a century, Pei has won virtually every award of any significance in his profession, from the Gold Medal of the American Institute of Architects to the Pritzker Prize. The durability of his prominence, however, has much to do with his ability to grow as an artist as well as his skills in creating one of the most respected firms in American architectural history.
Pei’s achievement is the more remarkable in light of his background. He was born in 1917 in Canton, China, the son of a prominent banker, and received his early schooling in Shanghai. He came to the United States in 1935 to study, first at the University of Pennsylvania and then at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he concentrated in engineering.
After completing his degree, Pei went on to Harvard in 1940 to pursue architecture during the heady days of Gropius and Breuer, who had brought with them the avantgarde theories and practices they had developed at the Bauhaus in Germany. Pei received his Master’s degree in 1946 and briefly served on the Harvard faculty.
Despite his training under European émigrés, Pei has always retained a recognizably Chinese sensitivity to nature, art, and time. (Pei’s thesis under Gropius was a design for an art museum in China.) This sensitivity was developed during childhood visits to his family’s villa in the ancient city of Suzhou, not far from Shanghai. There, Pei was exposed to the culture of “rock farming,” the traditional practice of selecting rocks in nature and setting them aside to be eroded in lakes and rivers into ornamental elements for the gardens of scholars and the wealthy.
Following his Harvard years, Pei was obliged to subsume his design sensibilities to issues of planning and development when he went to work in 1948 for William Zeckendorf as head of the New York real estate magnate’s in-house architectural team. There, Pei oversaw schemes for the redevelopment of such cities as Denver, Philadelphia, and Washington, DC, acquiring a sense of large-scale planning as well as an appreciation of finance and management.
With the financial decline of the Zeckendorf firm, Pei set out on his own in 1955. He took with him several colleagues and went on with them to create I.M.Pei and Partners, which was to become one of the most respected architectural teams in the nation. Many of the buildings that the partners were to design were mundane, however well engineered and detailed, but many were of extremely high quality, and each partner was allowed to pursue projects in a semiautonomous fashion. The shared affinity in the office for abstract forms in concrete and glass often made it difficult to identify the lead designer for a particular project, but Pei, who has been responsible for roughly one-third of the firm’s nearly 200 buildings and urban design projects, can claim most of the best.
Pei’s first major achievement was the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), finished in 1967, outside Boulder, Colorado. NCAR was a boldly sculptural composition that sought to integrate the scientific needs of scientists with a form that was visually sympathetic to the Rocky Mountains that rose behind it.
The success of the Colorado building contributed heavily to Pei’s selection in 1964 by Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis as architect for the John F.Kennedy Memorial Library. Originally intended for a site in Cambridge, Massachusetts, adjacent to Harvard University, the project fell prey to local politics and was eventually transferred to a site on Boston Harbor. Although the combination of crisp, abstract geometry with a large glassed-in atrium overlooking the water was characteristic of the developing Pei aesthetic, in the end the extended delays and design changes that were imposed on the original made the building a disappointment, as the architect himself has conceded publicly.
Nevertheless, the momentum created for the firm by the Kennedy commission raised I.M.Pei and Partners to national prominence. That momentum nearly stalled, however, when the windows of the John Hancock Building, a sleek office tower completed by the firm in 1976 in Boston, began to break and fall out. The designer of the building was Pei’s partner, Henry Cobb, but the crisis affected the entire firm, and although the cause of the failure was eventually attributed to the manufacturer of the glass, the negative publicity slowed new commissions to a trickle.
The firm began its slow return to health largely on the strength of Pei’s work in art museums, most notably the Everson Museum of Art (1968) in Syracuse, New York, and the Johnson Museum (1973) at Cornell University. These were hard-edged, late modernist geometric compositions in concrete but with interiors that were both dramatic and sensitive and judged to be superior settings for their collections.
The enthusiastic reception of these buildings led to Pei’s selection as architect of the East Building of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, completed in 1978. Key to the success of the building was the client, Paul Mellon, whose father had paid for the original National Gallery (1941), designed by John Russell Pope. The East Building was a full-fledged expression of Pei’s enduring affection for abstract form, yet it was inflected on the interior with a skill at manipulating light to soften the effect of the hard materials, primarily marble and glass, and organizing the movement of visitors to create added visual interest.
In 1979, following the reopening of relations between the United States and China, Pei accepted an invitation to design a hotel on the outskirts of Beijing. Pei hoped to develop a modern architectural form for his native country, which had sunk into grim utilitarianism, while maintaining traditional Chinese architectural themes. Although the building enjoyed considerable critical success, it was neglected by its government owners and failed to spark the stylistic progress that Pei had contemplated.
However, the pains of Fragrant Hill, completed in 1982, were minimal compared to those of the Louvre museum in Paris, the first phase of which was completed in 1989. French President François Mitterrand asked Pei to undertake a fundamental renovation and reorganization of the museum, and Pei responded with a proposal that was as much urban planning as architecture, redistributing the collection by emptying portions of the palace formerly occupied by government agencies and creating a system of underground access. However, the attention of the public was concentrated on the glass pyramid that Pei inserted at the center of the composition. The initial reaction was outrage that a nonFrench architect would have the temerity to tamper with what is arguably the most sacred site of French culture. However, on completion of the pyramid itself, the reception changed dramatically. Pei had hoped to minimize the effect of a new structure on the existing historic architecture but ended up creating a landmark that rapidly began to compete with the Eiffel Tower as a symbol of Paris itself.
The year 1989 saw a host of other openings in addition to the Louvre Pyramid, including the Meyerson Symphony Center in Dallas and several smaller commissions. All were distinguished by a softening of Pei’s austere modernist palette. The Meyerson in particular displayed an almost Romantic use of curves that modulated the architect’s familiar formal rigor to powerful effect. Even the 70-story Bank of China tower in Hong Kong (his only true skyscraper design), with its irregular stepped shaft, displayed a compositional delicacy that had been absent from many of Pei’s earlier works.
By no means were all of Pei’s commissions of this period uniformly good. The Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio, recalled the lifelessness of the Kennedy Library and for some of the same reasons. Pei’s best work has always resulted from a close personal relationship with a wealthy and powerful client, such as Paul Mellon or François Mitterrand, and in the case of Rock ’n’ Roll, the instability of the funding and disagreements among the backers aggravated Pei’s understandably limited familiarity with the musical history that the building was meant to celebrate.
In 1989 Pei had already begun a gradual separation from his firm, by then named Pei, Cobb, Freed, and Partners (in recognition of his longtime collaborators Henry Cobb and James Freed), and while maintaining an office in the same building and still calling on the organization’s staff, began to practice even more independently. The projects of this period included the Shinji Shumeikai bell tower (1990) for a religious organization in Shiga, Japan; the Regent (now Four Seasons) Hotel (1992), in New York City; and projects for art museums in Athens and Luxembourg.
However, what might prove to be Pei’s last major work is the Miho Museum outside Kyoto, Japan, completed in 1998. Designed for the religious organization that had commissioned the Shiga bell tower, the museum was built on a remote site in a nature preserve near Kyoto. To reduce the effect of the building on the natural surroundings, the entire top of a small mountain was removed, the museum inserted, and the mountain— including many of the original trees—restored. Access was provided by an elegant suspension bridge and a tunnel, both designed by the architect, working with the structural engineer Leslie Robertson, who was the engineer on the Bank of China tower, among other Pei projects.
The museum is characterized by Pei’s familiar elegant detailing in glass and steel, but its greatest success lies in the combination of crisp modernist forms with classic Japanese architectural tradition rendered in contemporary materials. In that, the Miho Museum represents a fulfillment of Pei’s most fundamental affections—for nature, for elegant abstract form, and for the display of fine works of art.
CARTER WISEMAN
Sennott R.S. Encyclopedia of twentieth century architecture, Vol.3 (P-Z). Fitzroy Dearborn., 2005. |
