I.M. Pei: His name means 'indelible mark'

Architect I.M. Pei, whose modern designs and high-profile projects made him one of the best-known and most prolific architects of the 20th century, has died. His death was confirmed by Thomas Guss, his press contact on Thursday. He was 102.

Pei, whose portfolio included a controversial renovation of Paris' Louvre Museum and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, died overnight, his son Chien Chung Pei told the New York Times.

Ieoh Ming Pei was born in Suzhou, China, in 1917. He grew up in a house where gardens and airy pavilions merged with the landscape. Pei biographer Carter Wiseman says that the natural world deeply influenced Pei.

"He was interested in the sculptural properties of rocks. There was an affinity for nature and for history that most Americans do not get, no matter how hard we try," Wiseman explained.

Pei's father was a banker, his mother an artist. He came to the U.S. as a teenager in 1935, went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University and was influenced by the work of pioneering modernists Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright.

After teaching and working for the US government, Pei went to work for a New York developer in 1948 and started his own firm in 1955.

The museums, municipal buildings, hotels, schools and other structures that Pei built around the world showed precision geometry and an abstract quality with a reverence for light. They were composed of stone, steel and glass and, as with the Louvre, he often worked glass pyramids into his projects.

The Louvre, parts of which date to the 12th century, proved to be Pei's most controversial work, starting with the fact that he was not French. After being chosen for the job by President Francois Mitterrand amid much secrecy, Pei began by making a four-month study of the museum and French history.

He created a futuristic 70-foot-tall (21-m) steel-framed, glass-walled pyramid as a grand entrance for the museum with three smaller pyramids nearby. It was a striking contrast to the existing Louvre structures in classic French style and was reviled by many French.

A French newspaper described Pei's pyramids as "an annex to Disneyland" while an environmental group said they belonged in a desert.

"I would say the first year and a half was really hell," the architect said in a PBS documentary. "I couldn't walk the streets of Paris without people walking looking at me and saying, 'There you go again. What are you doing here? What are you doing to us? What are you doing to our great Louvre?' "

Two decades passed and, in 2009, Henri Loyrette, the Louvre's director at the time, called it a masterpiece. When you ask visitors why they are at the Louvre, he said, they generally give three answers: the Mona Lisa, the Venus de Milo and the Pyramid.

"Contemporary architects tend to impose modernity on something," he said in a New York Times interview in 2008. "There is a certain concern for history but it's not very deep. I understand that time has changed, we have evolved. But I don't want to forget the beginning. A lasting architecture has to have roots."

Pei didn't like labels. He said there's no such thing as modern, postmodern or deconstructivist architecture. But he was considered a modernist. In 1970, he defined his approach in an interview for a documentary.

"If the problem is a complicated problem, then the building will result just that way," Pei said. "But then after that we have to simplify it. We have to eliminate the inessential."

His architecture, he said, was not just geometry.

"There are many other elements that come into play to create a form," said Pei. "Space, which is what architecture really is. You have to have light. ... Light is terribly important."

What are shapes without light, he asked — and added, "The light of the sun is magical."

Other notable Pei projects include the John F. Kennedy Library in Dorchester, Massachusetts, the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, the East Wing of the National Gallery of Art in Washington and the Dallas City Hall.

When Pei won the international Pritzker Architecture Prize in 1983, he used the $100,000 award to start a program for aspiring Chinese architects to study in the United States.

Even though he formally retired from his firm in 1990, Pei was still taking on projects in his late 80s, such as museums in Luxembourg, Qatar and his ancestral home of Suzhou.

Pei, a slight man who wore round, owlish glasses, became a US citizen in 1955. He was married to Eileen Loo from 1942 until her death in 2014. They had four children, two of whom became architects.

"He was a very genuine and unique person. He was exactly who we saw in public — very gracious," said Fred Teng, president of America China Public Affair Institute.

"His work is very advanced," Teng told China Daily. "People really appreciate the thoughtfulness and the work he had put in."

Teng, who has known Pei since 1980s, said that "Beyond his career, he also always felt very proud to be a Chinese American. He never shied away from it — he was proud."

Pei and his legacy were commemorated by people around the world on social media.

"For this Chinese-American growing up in the D.C. area, the East Wing of the National Gallery of Art was an extraordinarily special place. A monument to beauty and to the possibilities of being an immigrant. RIP to a legend," tweeted Jia Lynn Yang, deputy national editor at the New York Times.

"His death is a great loss to the nation, to the National Gallery of Art, and to each one of our visitors who has marveled at his timeless design of our East Building," tweeted Kaywin Feldman, director of the National Gallery of Art.

Pei's privileged upbringing helped him navigate the alpha-male world of architecture and real estate. He was able to schmooze with the powerful, which led to projects like the apartments on Manhattan's East Side called the Kips Bay Towers, the Kennedy Library in Boston and the East Building of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

His name, I.M., stands for Ieoh Ming, which means, roughly, "to make an indelible mark".

Reuters and The Associated Press contributed to this story.

Contact the writers at chrisdavis@chinadailyusa.com