I. M. Pei

His family had been in Suzhou since the Ming, first in medicinal herbs, later among the scholar-gentry, and his uncle owned the Shizilin garden where he spent summers. His father ran banks. His mother, Lien Kwun, was a devout Buddhist and a flautist who took him on meditation retreats and left his siblings behind. The family moved to Shanghai when he was 10. Soon after, his mother developed cancer, was prescribed opium, and gave him the pipe to prepare. She died just after his 13th birthday. He learned English off Dickens and the Bible and picked his country off Bing Crosby pictures. He sailed in 1935, found Pennsylvania teaching Beaux-Arts, fled to MIT for engineering, and was talked back into architecture by a dean who liked his eye.

Harvard put him under Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer, and 12 years with the developer William Zeckendorf taught him what a budget was. Jacqueline Kennedy picked him for her husband's library in 1964 because he struck her as full of promise, like Jack. The project changed sites, took 15 years, and left him unsatisfied with what opened at Columbia Point in 1979. In between came the mesa laboratory above Boulder, Dallas City Hall, and the National Gallery's East Building in 1978. The Bank of China Tower, four triangular shafts off a square base, topped out in Hong Kong in 1990. Then the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the Suzhou Museum near his uncle's garden, and the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha. And in the Cour Napoléon, the glass pyramid he had first drawn for Kennedy.

A month after joining the Harvard design school in December 1942 he left it for the National Defense Research Committee, where a member told him that if he knew how to build he should also know how to destroy. Japanese cities were wood and paper, so they put him on incendiary bombs. He spent two and a half years at it and revealed almost nothing about the work for the rest of his life. The other wound was the John Hancock Tower in Boston, designed by his partner Henry Cobb. Glass panels cracked and fell in a 1973 windstorm, the whole building was reglazed, three firms sued each other until a 1981 settlement, and new commissions dried up. Pei would not discuss it for years.

Nine Parisians in 10 opposed the pyramid, by his estimate, and one wrote that he was surprised anyone had gone looking for a Chinese architect in America to handle the historic heart of France. When it opened in March 1989 approval stood at 56 percent, and Le Figaro, which had savaged it, later threw a party underneath. Pei said afterward that no project would be too difficult. That summer he watched the army fire on civilians in Beijing and wrote in the New York Times that China was besmirched. He spent his 1983 Pritzker money on scholarships for Chinese students who agreed to go home. He turned 100 in 2017 and died in his Manhattan apartment on May 16, 2019.

I. M. Pei's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Mesa Laboratory, Boulder, Colorado building
  The National Center for Atmospheric Research, cut into the Front Range 1967
• East Building, National Gallery of Art building
  Two triangles fitted into an awkward trapezoid of land in Washington 1978
• John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum building
  Fifteen years and two sites. He thought the result had lost its original passion 1979
• The Louvre Pyramid building
  The first foreign architect ever given work on the Louvre 1989
• Bank of China Tower, Hong Kong building
  Worked out from a bundle of sticks at his house in Katonah 1990
• Museum of Islamic Art, Doha building
  Built on its own island after he toured Islamic architecture to find the form 2008

• 1930 aged ~13 His mother dies of cancer shortly after his 13th birthday He had been the one assigned to prepare the opium prescribed for her pain.
• 1935 aged ~18 Sails for San Francisco and takes a train to Philadelphia He had chosen America over England partly on the strength of Bing Crosby films.
• 1942 aged ~25 Marries Eileen Loo and joins the Harvard Graduate School of Design
• 1943 aged ~26 Leaves Harvard for the National Defense Research Committee Two and a half years on incendiary bombs meant for Japanese cities.
• 1964 aged ~47 Jacqueline Kennedy chooses him for the Kennedy Library She called it an emotional decision. He and her husband had been born the same year.
• 1973 aged ~56 Hancock Tower glass panels fracture and fall during construction Nobody was hurt. The litigation ran until 1981 and the firm's work dried up.
• May 30, 1978 aged 61 The East Building of the National Gallery opens
• March 1989 aged 71 The Louvre Pyramid opens to the public A poll then found 56 percent in favor and 23 percent still against.
• May 16, 2019 aged 102 Dies at his Manhattan apartment at 102

• Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis 1929–1994
  First Lady who restored the White House as a museum and shaped the public memory of her husband's presidency. chose him
• John F. Kennedy 1917–1963
  35th President whose brief tenure included the Cuban Missile Crisis and the launch of the Apollo program. memorialized
• Frank Lloyd Wright 1867–1959
  Architect and engineer whose organic architecture, including Fallingwater, reshaped the built environment. drove to Taliesin to meet him and gave up waiting
• Henry Kissinger 1923–2023
  National security adviser and secretary of state who shaped détente, China policy, and controversial Cold War interventions. recommended the Committee of 100
• Maya Lin b. 1959
  Designer of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial whose work transformed American memorial architecture. later monument architect
• Frank Gehry 1929–2025
  Developed a sculptural architectural language seen in the Walt Disney Concert Hall and other landmarks. successor generation