ICONIC ARCHITECT DIES AT 102
US’s Ieoh Ming Pei was mastermind behind award-winning modern structures
IEOH Ming Pei, the preeminent United States architect who forged a distinct brand of modern building design with his sharp lines and stark structures, has died here, his sons’ architecture firm said on Thursday. He was 102 years old.
From the controversial Louvre Pyramid in Paris to the landmark Bank of China tower in Hong Kong, the Chinese-born Pei was the mastermind behind works seen as embracing modernity tempered by a grounding in history.
Pei Partnership Architects confirmed Pei’s death. The New York
Times, citing Pei’s son Li Chung, said the architect had died overnight on Wednesday into Thursday.
“Contemporary architects tend to impose modernity on something. There is a certain concern for history but it’s not very deep,” Pei, with his owlish roundrimmed glasses, told NYT in a 2008 interview.
“I understand that times have changed, we have evolved. But I don’t want to forget the beginning,” he said.
“A lasting architecture has to
have roots.”
His work earned the 1983 Pritzker Prize, considered architecture’s Nobel. Of his nearly 50 designs in the United States and around the world, more than half won major awards.
Born in China in 1917, banker’s son Ieoh Ming Pei came to the US at 17 to study architecture, receiving an undergraduate degree in the field from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1940.
He then enrolled in Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, where he received a master ’s degree in architecture in 1946. He became a naturalised US citizen in 1954.
In one standout undertaking, he deftly inserted into the monumental structures of the capital of his adopted country the modern angles of the East Building of the National Gallery of Art, opened in 1978.
The stunning concrete and glass structure features huge mirrored pyramids and a 15m-tall waterfall.
It was “a composition of angular stone forms... that remains the most visible emblem of modern Washington”, said an NYT review 30 years after its unveiling.
Then French president Francois Mitterrand was so impressed that he had Pei hired to build a glass pyramid into the courtyard of the Louvre, the world’s most visited museum.
The project was deeply controversial in Paris and Pei endured a roasting from critics before the giant glass structure opened in 1989, but his creation is now an icon of the French capital.
“I received many angry glances in the streets of Paris,” Pei later said, confessing that “after the Louvre, I thought no project would be too difficult”.
Other well-known and characteristic Pei projects — often graceful combinations of geometric planes — include the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland, Ohio; the Miho Museum of Shigo in Japan; the Morton Meyerson Symphony Centre in Dallas and the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston.
Despite being a confessed Islamic art novice, Pei was also commissioned to design the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha, Qatar, which opened in 2008 to great fanfare.
The desert-toned building, inspired by the 13th-century Mosque of Ahmad ibn Tulun in Cairo, incorporates geometric patterns and is lit by reflected light entering from above.
Pei spent months travelling the Muslim world seeking inspiration.
“Islam was one religion I did not know,” he told NYT the year of the opening.
“So I studied the life of Muhammad. I went to Egypt and Tunisia.”