How I.M. Pei embraced past and present

Hu Shaoxue, a senior architect and professor at the Architectural Design and Research Institute of Tsinghua University, was among faculty members who received and had discussions with Pei when he visited the university in 1994 to be named an emeritus professor.

Hu said Pei gave a lecture at the university during his three-day stay in Beijing, and mainly talked about his design for the Louvre Pyramid.

"He said people misunderstood him by relating the design to an Egyptian pyramid. He said he chose a pyramid shape because it was the smallest structure he could think of that would not disrupt the historic landscape of the Louvre whilst capturing as much light as possible.

"He said an architect needed to think carefully, and that was why it took him some six months to study and to analyze before accepting the Louvre commission offered by then French President Francois Mitterrand."

Annette Fierro, associate professor of architecture at the Weitzman School of Design, University of Pennsylvania, said Pei's work at the Louvre revolutionized the way construction was done in France.

"Before that, there would be a system of detail in construction, and he insisted he would not do that. When he built the Louvre Pyramid, there were many, many protests. There were a series of challenges while it was built. There were articles in the newspapers every single day. People were against the project and were outraged.

"And then when it opened, they realized it was not going to be a standard glass building. It had a kind of specialness to it, in the way that the structure worked, in the details — all of the finesse of the building worked against the existing context of the Louvre."

Fierro said Pei "completely revolutionized the way you build in a historic context, because the Louvre Pyramid was a total departure — it was glass and steel, and it was very advanced technologically".

Hu, from Tsinghua University, recalled that Pei said that generally there are two types of people in architecture, "one making actual designs and the other carrying out theoretical studies — and he was the former".

"He was quite pragmatic. He was not an architect who liked to produce meaningless rhetoric, write many books or publish theories," Hu said.

Pei's work in China includes the Xiangshan Hotel in Beijing, the Bank of China tower in Hong Kong and its head office in Beijing, which he viewed as a memorial for his father.

His design for the Suzhou Museum demonstrates a strong personal attachment to his family's ancestral home, cherished childhood memories and his understanding of the need to usher Chinese cultural traditions and philosophies into a modern context.

Pei was 87 when he started to design the Suzhou Museum. Qian Zhaoyue, deputy director of the museum, said its workers were impressed by Pei's persistence when he was designing the building.