An architectural bridge between two worlds

Two decades ago, Li Chung (Sandi) Pei worked alongside his father, I.M. Pei, as Suzhou Museum took shape. Now, 20 years after the museum's completion, Sandi, 77, is back in Suzhou, Jiangsu province, once again — this time with his daughter, Anna Alice Pei, who is beginning to explore the family legacy in her own way.

For the Pei family, China and the United States have never been simply two places on a map, divided by distance and joined only by circumstance. Across three generations, they have been points of departure, places of belonging and, ultimately, worlds to be connected.

I.M. Pei left China for the US, where he became one of the most renowned architects of his generation, while carrying with him a deep cultural imprint of his homeland. Sandi grew up and was educated in the US, yet over the past several decades has maintained a sustained engagement with China, participating in its architectural and urban development. Anna, the third generation, is now approaching that inheritance from another direction — through archives, family memory and the preservation of the traces left behind by her grandfather.

The forms have changed from one generation to the next. The impulse has not.

Suzhou Museum has become one of the most tangible expressions of the Pei family's connection to Suzhou.

"A bridge is a good metaphor," Sandi says. "Suzhou means a great deal. This is our ancestral home."

The Pei family has more than 600 years of history in Suzhou. The city's gardens, architecture and cultural traditions formed part of the family's inheritance long before architecture became the medium through which later generations would engage with the wider world.

Sandi recalls how deeply those surroundings shaped his father. In Suzhou, I.M. Pei was drawn to gardens and landscapes, and particularly to the garden rocks that had been shaped over generations by craftsmen. What fascinated him was not simply their physical beauty, but the continuity they embodied — the way the hand of one generation could remain visible in something passed on to the next.

That sense of continuity became part of the architectural thinking Sandi Pei witnessed in his father: tradition did not have to be reproduced literally in order to remain present.

Sandi himself, however, did not begin with architecture.

In the mid-1960s, when he was about 14 or 15, his father was becoming increasingly well-known. The 1964 commission for the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston was one of the moments when that public recognition accelerated. For a teenage Sandi, the experience was both close and strangely distant.

"I was both a participant and an observer," he recalls.

He was close enough to see his father's career unfolding, yet young enough to watch it from the perspective of a son rather than an architect. What he was witnessing, he would later understand, was not merely the rise of a celebrated professional, but the beginning of a much longer conversation between cultures, places and generations.

That conversation was reflected in the way his father approached architecture.

For I.M. Pei, Sandi recalls, buildings did not exist in isolation. Art, trees, landscapes and public spaces were integral to the experience of architecture. The aim was not simply to construct a functional object, but to create environments in which people would want to remain, gather and interact — places capable of contributing to the vitality of a community.

Suzhou Museum offers perhaps the most intimate expression of that philosophy.

For Sandi, its significance is not exhausted by the fact that it was designed by his father, or that he and his brother worked closely with him on the project. The museum represents a return to a cultural landscape that had helped shape I.M. Pei's imagination from an early age.

The challenge was not to re-create traditional Suzhou. It was to listen to it.

The courtyards, shifting views, white walls, dark timber and carefully orchestrated natural light draw on the logic of the traditional garden while translating it into a contemporary architectural language. Rather than treating tradition as a visual vocabulary to be copied, the design seeks to distill the principles beneath it.

That distinction goes to the heart of I.M. Pei's architectural philosophy, which he once described as "a long conversation" — with history, place, light, materials, and across generations. In Suzhou Museum, that conversation takes place between the cultural memory of the city and the language of modern architecture.

For Sandi, however, the conversation does not end with architecture.

"Through our architecture, we become diplomats in what we call 'soft power'," he says. "Architecture is a form of cultural diplomacy."

It is a role he has come to understand through his own experience.

Sandi first came to China in 1978. In the decades since, he has witnessed the country's rapid transformation and has participated in its development himself, including through a building he designed in Suzhou Industrial Park.

What interests him is not simply how much China has changed, but how the direction of cultural exchange has changed with it.

He recalls a time when Western architecture was an important reference point for China. Today, in his view, the relationship is more reciprocal. He points to the increasingly integrated way Chinese cities bring together transportation, workplaces, shopping, residential areas and cultural functions, seeing in this approach a form of urban vitality that can itself become part of an international conversation.

For Sandi, such exchange is precisely what a bridge is meant to enable.

Architecture and art, he argues, can create channels of communication that reach beyond language and political disputes. They can bring people into contact through shared spaces and experiences, even when the broader relationship between countries is complicated.

When asked whether art and culture can bridge differences, he says, "Not only do I think it can. I think it must."

For Sandi, cultural exchange is not an ornamental addition to international relations. It is part of how people come to understand one another.

Suzhou remains central to that understanding. The city is not merely the setting in which the Pei family's architectural story happens to intersect. It is part of the cultural inheritance from which that story emerged.

Sandi and his elder brother, Chien Chung (Didi) Pei, worked closely with their father on Suzhou Museum and saw the project through to completion. Twenty years later, the building has become a tangible continuation of that family connection.

"It's a continuation of the family carrying it on into the next generation," Sandi says.

Now the next generation is walking through Suzhou with him.

Anna's relationship with the family legacy is different from her father's. She is not yet defining herself through a particular architectural role. Instead, she has spent years working with her grandfather's archives, gradually discovering the person behind the public figure through letters, photographs and everyday objects.

The work has changed the way she thinks about inheritance. A legacy is not preserved only in monuments. Sometimes it survives in the smallest traces of a life — things that require patience and attention to understand.

"I'm still learning what my vehicle will be," Anna says.

The uncertainty is part of the answer. Her generation does not necessarily have to reproduce the form of the previous one. It has to decide what is worth carrying forward, and find its own means of doing so.

For Anna, Suzhou Museum carries a particularly personal meaning. She describes it as "a symbol of my grandfather's and my father's love for Suzhou", their way of leaving "a permanent heart" in a city that has been part of the family story for more than six centuries.

Her own bridge may ultimately take another form — through archives, art, cultural exchange and the preservation of memory.

That may be the more enduring lesson of the Pei family's story: continuity does not require repetition.

One generation built through architecture. Another carried that dialogue into new contexts. The next is still discovering its own language.

Twenty years after helping his father bring Suzhou Museum to life, Sandi has returned to Suzhou with his daughter beside him.

The museum remains rooted in the city that has long been part of the family's cultural memory.

The bridge, however, is not a finished structure. It exists in the movement between generations, between cultures and between what is inherited and what is yet to be imagined.

CHINA DAILY