Attribute of Airtist

When newly elected Socialist President François Mitterand announced that I. M. Pei had been hired to design the entrance to the Louvre, many critics flew to their respective podiums. How could a political party so outspoken about U.S. imperialism allow an American to resurrect their most sacred space? Many balked at the American association, scowling as they remembered art's exodus from the cafés of Paris to the lofts of New York.

Pei's supporters pointed out that he was an American who was born in China, a perfect consolidation of the West's flashiness and the East's efficiency. Pei had also been schooled in the Modernist tradition, a European baby if there ever was one. After all, at Harvard he had studied under the Bauhaus masters Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer.

When the Louvre's new glass pyramids (one of which towered 70 feet above the ground) were uncovered, a vast public gasp was heard across Paris. The juxtaposition seemed outrageous, to say the least. The great French tradition had been compromised, the aesthetic line of the venerable structure ripped to shreds by these angular shapes erupting from amongst the cobblestones.

Again, his supporters came out in droves. They contended that only abstract forms and materials were simple enough to compliment the Louvre's beauty. His open atrium proved incredibly efficient, enlivened by balconies and escalators descending into a modernized space. Meanwhile, Ieoh Ming Pei had become perhaps the most recognized name in architecture since Frank Lloyd Wright.

The man behind the scandal was born in Canton in 1917, but left China at the age of 18 to make a name for himself in America. He immediately found a place at MIT and completed his bachelor's degree there in 1940. However, it seems the defining years of his career began when Pei went on to graduate school at Harvard. Pei had begun teaching at Harvard when he was hired at Hugh Asher Stubbins in 1946 (just three years before Mao would control all of mainland China). After two years, New York beckoned -- he moved to Webb & Knapp, serving as head of the architectural division for 12 years before opening his own firm. Since then, he has received numerous awards, including the prestigious Pritzker Prize in 1983.

Pei is a living example of Leonardo da Vinci's dictum: "Strength is born of constraint, and dies of freedom." For Pei, constraint consists in the everyday materials of an architect's palette: light, space, proportion, environment. The latter particularly engages him. Often, he will study a place for days to get a taste of its spirit, his mind's eye weaving designs into the existing milieu. "After all," he says, "no building exists alone."

Consider his design for the Bank of China in Hong Kong, the largest building in Asia. With its series of glass triangles laid side by side, the structure seems to jut out of the earth like a levitating icicle (here again we see the glass and triangle motifs). Despite its size and overtly modern aesthetic, the building seems to slide into its environment -- even the mountains that frame Hong Kong embrace the structure. It's a solid yet elegant geometry that both accommodates and augments space. In a sense, Pei takes his essentialized forms from the earth's own blueprints. Perhaps the architect himself puts it best: "For me, there has to be geometry. What are buildings but cubes, spheres, tetrahedrons? There are endless possibilities in the way you arrange these basic shapes. That is what interests me."