I. M. Pei

Ieoh Ming Pei was born in Canton on 26 April 1917, the son of a banker, into a family that had been landowners for generations. As a child he moved with them to the Shanghai French Concession, where he was exposed to Western culture and education; an uncle owned the famous Lion Grove Garden (獅子林), whose oddly shaped rocks would later influence his architecture. He left for the United States in 1935, planning to study architecture and then return to practise in China, but the Second World War and the revolution prevented him. He studied at the University of Pennsylvania, then at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (B. Arch. 1940) and the Harvard Graduate School of Design (M. Arch. 1946), where Walter Gropius was among his professors. In 1948 the New York developer William Zeckendorf hired him as director of architecture at Webb & Knapp, where he worked on large urban projects, from the Mile High Center in Denver to the Society Hill complex in Philadelphia. He became a US citizen in 1954 and founded I. M. Pei & Associates in 1955; it became I. M. Pei & Partners in 1966, then Pei Cobb Freed & Partners in 1989. He officially retired in 1990 but continued to work on projects; his sons Li Chung and Chien Chung Pei founded Pei Partnership Architects in 1992.

The 1983 Pritzker Prize citation, read by Carleton Smith, secretary to the jury, says that he "has given this century some of its most beautiful interior spaces and exterior forms" and that his "concern has always been the surroundings in which his buildings would rise". As a student at Harvard, Pei doubted that modernism would become an international style and began to think of a modernism adapted to cultural diversity. For him, "it is not an exaggeration to say that light is the key to architecture". The National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder (1967) raises chiselled towers that blend into the reddish mountains of Colorado; their sculpted, geometric forms broke with the Mies van der Rohe style and later brought him acclaim as "the Magician of Geometry". At the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland (1995), on the shore of Lake Erie, he topped the building with a transparent tent-like structure, "open — like the music", as he put it. At the Fragrant Hill Hotel near Beijing (1982), the inner courtyard draws on a Chinese garden in Suzhou that he had seen as a child; he persuaded the Chinese government not to build a high-rise hotel near the Forbidden City and proposed a low one on a former hunting ground. At the Miho Museum in Shiga Prefecture (1997), about 80% of the museum lies underground to preserve its natural environment, and light enters through a glass roof built from space frames of triangles.

He was chosen in 1964 to design the John F. Kennedy Library; Jacqueline Kennedy said all the candidates were excellent, "But Pei! He loves things to be beautiful." It opened in 1979 near Boston, a year after the East Building of the National Gallery of Art in Washington (1978). Named architect of the Grand Louvre in July 1983 with the backing of President François Mitterrand, he conceived a central underground reception area giving direct access to the museum's three wings, whose monumental entrance takes the form of a glass pyramid, inaugurated on 29 March 1989. The plan, unveiled by President Mitterrand in 1984, met a barrage of criticism in France. "All through the centuries, the Louvre has undergone violent change," Pei said. He wanted glazing of absolute transparency, so that the palace's historic façades could be seen from inside the pyramid as from outside: it took two years of research to develop this extra-white glass. "I acted as a landscape architect rather than an architect," he said.

Beyond the United States and Paris he also designed the Bank of China Tower in Hong Kong, a tall high-tech tower, the new exhibition building of the Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin, behind the Zeughaus (2003), the Musée d'Art Moderne in Luxembourg (2006) and the Suzhou Museum (2006). The Museum of Islamic Art in Doha (2008) stands on an artificial island just off the waterfront, inspired by Islamic architectural history, the Ibn Tulun mosque in Cairo in particular; its five-storey main building has a domed atrium and a cream-coloured limestone exterior that captures the changes in light during the day, with a 45-metre-tall window on the north side. The Macau Science Center opened in 2009. Pei received the AIA Gold Medal in 1979, the Pritzker Prize in 1983 (presented at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York by Jay A. Pritzker), the Praemium Imperiale at its first edition in 1989, the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1992 from President George H. W. Bush, and the RIBA Royal Gold Medal in 2010. He died in New York in May 2019, aged 102.