I.m. pei biography
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The designer of the building was Pei’s partner, Henry Cobb, but the crisis affected the entire firm, and although the cause of the failure was eventually attributed to the manufacturer of the glass, the negative publicity slowed new commissions to a trickle. In all, he has designed more than a dozen museums, most notably the Grand Louvre in Paris (1989); Miho Museum in Shiga, Japan (1997); Suzhou Museum in Suzhou, China (2006); and the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha (2008).
Other institutional projects by Mr.
Pei include churches, hospitals, and municipal buildings as well as academic facilities and libraries. At this time he also embarked on a series of museum projects—the building form with which he is now most closely identified—culminating in the East Building of the National Gallery of Art in Washington (1978) and the John Fitzgerald Kennedy Library in Boston (1979), both of which gained broad national attention.
Completed in 1979, the library is a nine-story modern structure that marries a starkly angled concrete tower with a glass-gridded pavilion. All were distinguished by a softening of Pei’s austere modernist palette.
Following his Harvard years, Pei was obliged to subsume his design sensibilities to issues of planning and development when he went to work in 1948 for William Zeckendorf as head of the New York real estate magnate’s in-house architectural team.
M. Pei began studying architecture in the United States in 1935 and eventually earned his B.A. from MIT and his M.A. from Harvard. A fellow of the American Institute of Architects and Royal Institute of British Architects, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Design, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Académie d'Architecture de France, and Britain’s Royal Academy of Arts.
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The enthusiastic reception of these buildings led to Pei’s selection as architect of the East Building of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, completed in 1978.
CARTER WISEMAN
Sennott R.S. Encyclopedia of twentieth century architecture, Vol.3 (P-Z). Pei’s best work has always resulted from a close personal relationship with a wealthy and powerful client, such as Paul Mellon or François Mitterrand, and in the case of Rock ’n’ Roll, the instability of the funding and disagreements among the backers aggravated Pei’s understandably limited familiarity with the musical history that the building was meant to celebrate.
In 1989 Pei had already begun a gradual separation from his firm, by then named Pei, Cobb, Freed, and Partners (in recognition of his longtime collaborators Henry Cobb and James Freed), and while maintaining an office in the same building and still calling on the organization’s staff, began to practice even more independently.
(The best known of the others are Edward Larrabee Barnes, Philip Johnson, and Paul Rudolph.) In a career spanning more than half a century, Pei has won virtually every award of any significance in his profession, from the Gold Medal of the American Institute of Architects to the Pritzker Prize. One of his first major projects was the Mile High Center in Denver, Colorado.
He took with him several colleagues and went on with them to create I.M.Pei and Partners, which was to become one of the most respected architectural teams in the nation.
His numerous contributions to the profession have been recognized with the Pritzker Architecture Prize, the AIA Gold Medal, and the Royal Gold Medal of the Royal Institute of British Architects, among many other honors.
Born in Guangzhou, China, in 1917, Ieoh Ming Pei came to the United States at the age of seventeen to study architecture.
These were hard-edged, late modernist geometric compositions in concrete but with interiors that were both dramatic and sensitive and judged to be superior settings for their collections. Access was provided by an elegant suspension bridge and a tunnel, both designed by the architect, working with the structural engineer Leslie Robertson, who was the engineer on the Bank of China tower, among other Pei projects.
By no means were all of Pei’s commissions of this period uniformly good. Many of the buildings that the partners were to design were mundane, however well engineered and detailed, but many were of extremely high quality, and each partner was allowed to pursue projects in a semiautonomous fashion. Around this time, Pei also worked as an assistant professor at the university.
World Famous Architect
In 1948, Pei joined New York-based architectural firm Webb & Knapp, Inc., as its director of architecture.
For his service to the United States, he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Medal of Arts from the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Smithsonian Institution’s Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum.
Mr. He received a bachelor’s degree from MIT in 1940 and a master’s in 1946 from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where he remained as an assistant professor until 1948.
That year he accepted an invitation from the developer William Zeckendorf, Sr., to become the director of architecture at Webb & Knapp, a New York real estate development company.
Gold Medal, American Institute of Architects;
1981 Gold Medal, French Academy of Architects;
1983 Pritzker Prize;
from 1989 firm renamed Pei, Cobb, Freed, and Partners;
16 May 2019 died in New York City, USA.