MIXED legacy
On I.M. Pei’s 100th birthday, many still critical of his work in Oklahoma City
No architect has affected the downtown Oklahoma City skyline more than I.M. Pei, but don’t expect locals to join celebrations of his 100th anniversary on Wednesday.
The celebrations are being organized by the city of Suzhou in China, which is home to one of Pei’s last projects, the Suzhou Museum, and also was his family’s ancestral home. In Boston, residents will be encouraged to celebrate Pei’s Kennedy Memorial Museum by taking a selfie with his photo wishing him happy birthday.
Pei’s work over a century includes icons around the world, including the Louvre Pyramid. But not many cities can boast of an entire downtown reshaped by the architect. Oklahoma City, however, hasn’t boasted of Pei’s work here in decades. Many of those who remember his legacy, generally, are generally pretty critical of his unfinished vision.
Most folks under the age of 40, meanwhile, don’t even realize Pei stepped foot in our town.
Pei was in his mid-40s and already earning international accolades when he was hired by city fathers who were seeking to launch an urban renewal program in the early 1960s. From his Manhattan office, Pei and his crew created a model, renderings and plans for a dramatic recreation of downtown Oklahoma City.
A $100 million regional shopping “Galleria” was to be the crown jewel of this new downtown. High-rise hotels and office buildings, a spectacular park and condominium housing would encircle it.
Pei told civic and business leaders only the combination of offices and a financial district, a cultural and recreation area, a convention center and hotels, plenty of retail shopping, and housing nurturing each other would revitalize the central business district.
To get the job done, much of
the old downtown would have to go.
The Oklahoman's Mary Jo Nelson, whose work I followed while I was growing up, correctly noted that Sept. 7, 1965, stood as a date with importance rivaling that of the April 22, 1889, Land Run. It was on that day the Oklahoma City Council adopted the Pei Plan for urban redevelopment.
Just weeks before the vote, Pei was featured in a Life magazine cover story about urban redevelopment, and his plan for Oklahoma City was featured side by side with the Kennedy Memorial Museum and projects in New York City and Philadelphia.
Tens of millions of dollars were being provided by Congress for the makeover. Liberty Bank, Fidelity Bank and Kerr McGee were committed to building new towers that lined up with Pei’s master plan. His
model of downtown, revolutionary itself in its scale and detail, was displayed at City Hall and State Fair Park to win popular support.
Contractors hired by Urban Renewal leveled 447 buildings, and private owners tore out another 75 or so over 220 acres between NW 6 and Interstate 40, from Shartel to the BNSF Railway.
By the mid-1970s, popular support for Urban Renewal, and Pei, had vanished as dynamite and bulldozers took down landmarks like the Criterion and Warner theaters, the Baum Building, and the Biltmore and Huckins hotels.
The downtown mall never materialized and the site instead became a massive two-level parking structure that was intended to be the base of the shopping center (the site is now home to Devon Energy Center).
Pei certainly deserves some of the criticism that dogged him locally for years. His plan was tied to his embrace in the 1960s of brutalist architecture.
He also was blamed for the actions of private developers. He did not call for destruction of the Biltmore or Huckins hotels. He urged city fathers not to tear down Main Street without first creating a new home for downtown’s surviving retailers.
By 1988, the Pei Plan was abandoned and the Oklahoma City Council declared “downtown is dead.” And it was at that moment the seeds were planted for MAPS and the revival of Oklahoma City.
Pei’s legacy is mixed. The Myriad Gardens, inspired by the Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen, Denmark, is perhaps the best of the Pei Plan to have been carried out, stubbornly and against all odds by Dean A. McGee. The former Kerr McGee tower, now headquarters to SandRidge Energy, is considered the best office tower design based on Pei’s master plan.
Large swaths of blight were cleared to make way for the gardens and the Cox Convention Center.
But Pei’s plan also eliminated what was a good street grid, albeit with what was a zigzag of north-south streets crossing between Sheridan and Reno Avenues. Pei replaced the street grid with superblocks that are hostile toward pedestrian traffic. That, in turn, has hurt significant retail development in the Central Business District.
We lost way too much of our history.
In implementing Pei’s vision, city fathers committed their own errors, choosing to tear down aging but functional buildings in favor of very uncertain prospects for a new mall, hotels and housing. They were in a rush to create something shiny and new.
He validated their efforts during his last visit in 1976. He told locals he was “very impressed” with their accomplishment and estimated they were halfway complete in fulfilling his vision.
Flaws aside, downtown has largely built on Pei’s legacy. But on his 100th birthday, his words in the 1965 Life magazine article should be heeded as new plans are implemented for Core to Shore and beyond.
“It’s like surgery; it takes a long time for the tissue around a wound to heal,” Pei said. “The city has to echo life. If our life is rough and tumble, so is the city. I’ve always felt that ugliness with vitality is tolerable. The great danger our cities face today is that their vitality will be sapped by too much concern for instant beauty.”