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I.M. Pei: Master Architect
| Article
# : |
19810 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
5 / 1991 |
1,912 Words |
| Author
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Shira Rosan
Shira Rosan is a practicing architect and architectural writer
currently living in New York. |
In more than four decades of architectural practice, I.M. Pei has done it all: the impossible (an addition to the Louvre), the enormous (Hong Kong's Bank of China Tower), the sparely elegant (the Shinji Shumeikai Bell Tower in Japan), and the grand (the Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center, in Dallas, Texas). He has won every major award in his field, including the American Institute of Architects' Gold Medal (1979) and the Pritzkers Prize (1983), architecture's equivalent of the Nobel; and he has produced so many of the important landmarks of twentieth-century architecture that the announced retirement of Pei from the day-to-day management of his firm may leave us wondering how the gap left by his departure will be filled, and how the cumulative effect of this most prolific architect's work will make itself felt on future generations of architects.
Ieoh Ming Pei was born in Canton, China, in 1971, the son of a prominent banker. He spent his childhood at elite Protestant schools in Hong Kong and Shanghai, both bustling, cosmopolitan cities, with summers at the family's villa at Suzhou. Raised as a member of a privileged class in an ancient, highly cultivated civilization, Pei remembers that as a child, "I had the impression that anything I wanted, I could get." He came to the United States to study architecture at the University of Pennsylvania in 1935, but finding the school's Beaux Arts emphasis not to his taste, Pei transferred after only a few weeks to the school of engineering at MIT, and from there to MIT's architecture school. In 1940 he received his degree and intended to return to China; but war had broken out, and like many of what historian Peter Kwong refers to as the "five thousand scholars"--Chinese students who were stranded in the United States by the outbreak of World War II--Pei decided to extend his stay a short time, until events made a return to China mare propitious. Many of these scholars never went back to their homeland at all; others, like Pei, returned as visitors decades later, after having made contributions to American arts and sciences that would forever ensure the reputation of their countrymen as intelligent, industrious, and often inspired.
Gropius and Breuer
While waiting to return to China, Pei took a job at the Boston engineering firm of Stone & Webster, then enrolled briefly at Harvard to study for a master's degree. He left almost immediately to work in the war effort but returned to Harvard in 1945 to study with Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer. Gropius had founded the legendary Bauhaus, which had been shut down by the Nazis; now he was offering to architecture students at Harvard
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