IN MEMORIAM : NEW YORK- I.M. Pei, world-renowned architect, dies at age 102
Chinese-born American architect I. M. Pei died at age 102. Among other accomplishments, he was known for designing the glass pyramid that serves as an entry for the Louvre in Paris. PHOTO: AFP
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NEW YORK (NYTIMES) – I. M. Pei, the Chinese-born American architect who began his long career working for a New York real-estate developer and ended it as one of the most revered architects in the world, has died. He was 102.
His son Chien Chung Pei said on Thursday (May 16) that his father had died overnight.
Mr Pei was probably best known for designing the East Building of the National Gallery of Art in Washington and the glass pyramid that serves as an entry for the Louvre in Paris.
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In Singapore, he was responsible for three landmarks – OCBC Centre, Raffles City and the trapezoidal The Gateway in Beach Road.
He was hired by William Zeckendorf in 1948, shortly after he In its early years, I. M. Pei & Associates mainly executed projects for Zeckendorf, including Kips Bay Plaza in New York, finished in 1963; Society Hill Towers in Philadelphia (1964); and Silver Towers in New York (1967). All were notable for their gridded concrete facades.
The firm became fully independent from Webb & Knapp in 1960, by which time Mr Pei, a cultivated man whose quiet, understated manner and easy charm masked an intense, competitive ambition, was winning commissions for major projects that had nothing to do with Zeckendorf.
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Among these were the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., completed in 1967, and the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse and the Des Moines Art Center, both finished in 1968.
They were the first in a series of museums he designed that would come to include the East Building (1978) and the Louvre pyramid (1989) as well as the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland, for which he designed what amounted to a huge glass tent in 1995. It was perhaps his most surprising commission.
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Mr Pei, not a rock ‘n’ roll fan, initially turned down the job. After he changed his mind, he prepared for the challenge of expressing the spirit of the music by traveling to rock concerts with Jann Wenner, the publisher of Rolling Stone.
The Cleveland project would not be Mr Pei’s last unlikely museum commission: His museum oeuvre would culminate in the call to design the Museum of Islamic Art, in Doha, Qatar, in 2008, a challenge Mr Pei accepted with relish.
A longtime collector of Western Abstract Expressionist art, he admitted to knowing little about Islamic art.
As with the Rock and Roll museum, Mr Pei saw the Qatar commission as an opportunity to learn about a culture he did not claim to understand.
He began his research by reading a biography of the Prophet Muhammad, and then commenced a tour of great Islamic architecture around the world.
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