 I.M. PeiGrand Louvre, Paris - France
Bank of China Tower, Hong Kong - China
Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin - Germany
Museum of Islamic Art, Doha - Qatar
Suzhou Museum, Suzhou - China
Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse NY - USA
Headquarters for Creative Artists Agency, Los Angeles - USA
Arco Tower, Dallas - USA
National Gallery of Art, Washington - USA
Bank of China Tower, Hong Kong - China
By Marcoantonio Ragone
"For me the important distinction is between a stylistic approach to the design; and an analytical approach giving the process of due consideration to time, place, and purpose...
My analytical approach requires a full understanding of the three essential elements...to arrive at an ideal balance among them".
So I.M. Pei summed up his working method as an architect.
This enables us to understand why, for example, before accepting the commission for the Louvre, he asked Mitterrand for four months to study the issues, tracing its centuries of history, exploring the significance of changes, before suggesting a design that would mediate coherently between the past and the requirements of the museum.
Only after traveling several times between New York and Paris, spending days busily inspecting the site, holding talks, inspecting the location (in secret) and studying the history of France in depth, did Pei feel able to accept the important commission.
All his work is done in this way.
His buildings in many cases have been as unconvincing on paper as they were highly appreciated when they were completed.
This is shown by the history of the Pyramid itself.
The fierce attacks by the French (particularly Parisians) and their "sincere" hostility toward the Pyramid weighed on him for a long time.
But Pei never abandoned the field, accepting debate (never carping), convinced of the rightness of his decisions and the knowledge he had gained during the period of study granted by Mitterrand.
He answered every question, met every objection with an explanation, and coped with the disappointment of the powerful.
(Chirac asked for a full-scale model to help him understand what the matter was. After seeing it he exclaimed: "C’est pas mal cet objet!")
In the end Pei emerged from the dispute with unanimous acclaim, even from his most stubborn detractors.
He had no doubt that the icon would win acceptance by its elegance and symbolism.
Pei felt some lingering regret at the public and experts' failure to consider the implications of the project as a whole and the broader solutions to chronic problems in the organization of space and its adaptation to new uses.
In these areas stone was the key material and made the architect's handling more distinctive than ever, as in the large atrium beneath the Pyramid, before the art galleries.
The overhead light, the sculptural staircase, the large entrance volume for the public, and the use of a single type of stone (beige limestone quarried in France) lining floors, stairs and passages are all so many unmistakable signs of Pei's conception of architectural space.
Pei's architecture has always been expressed in abstract geometric forms and volumes and built out of a limited number of materials, each used in ways that bring out its finest technical and expressive qualities.
Concrete, metal, glass and stone are the staples which he generally relies on and which most naturally embody his aesthetics.
It was through his use of stone that the Sino-American architect became firmly established in contemporary architecture.
He was already a successful architect when he was asked to complete the East Building of the National Gallery of Art in Washington.
This project brought him a reputation as one of the masters of modern architecture.
Of the Washington museum Donald Canty writes in his introductory essay to the 1985 MAA catalog:
"The site literally shaped the building.
Pei first sketched a trapezoidal 'envelope' for the building, then slashed a diagonal line across it, creating a large isosceles triangle which became the museum and a smaller right triangle a study center for the visual arts.
All of this made the building as an object very geometrical and very sculptural.
It looks, in fact, as it might have been carved from a single giant stone ...
In the case of the East Building the marble [a pink limestone from a long-established quarry in Tennessee] is used on the exterior in blocks three inches thick hung on stainless steel supports from concrete and brick core walls.
The same marble walls the huge central courtyard that is the core of the Museum ...
A huge volume traversed by bridges, terminating in an angular glass and metal skylight".
This project, completed in 1978, represents the maturation of a number of elements that had appeared earlier, for example in the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, near New York (1968).
Here we immediately recognize the theme of the great central atrium lined with pink granite, both natural and with the slivers of stone embedded in concrete.
The atrium, which leads off into various routes through the building, is dominated by a sculptural staircase with suspended walkways at various levels, very Piranesian by the conception and analogy of the image.
Today Pei is ninety-four years old and is rightly considered the last representative of the Modern Movement still active.
In all this time he has remained faithful to his stylistic creed, but steered clear of dogmas and fundamentalist temptations.
When he agreed to design the Fragrant Hill Hotel near Beijing, his first work in his homeland after leaving China in 1935, he allowed himself to be guided by the nature of the place and childhood memories.
He created a building open to its surroundings, with broad views over the elegant garden, restored to new life with the help of Chinese botanical experts.
The site, of particular environmental value, discouraged forms of pure modernity.
He preferred to design a sensitive building which would not diverge from the local culture and its values.
This decision caused some disappointment to the younger Chinese architects, who had expected a very different work from the famous master on his return from the United States.
It was no accident that the same sensitivity to the particular context of Chinese culture again manifested itself much later in the head office of the Bank of China in Beijing.
This was a building faced with travertine and of moderate height, in marked contrast to the new skyline of the capital with its vertical glass-sheathed skyscrapers and buildings.
But the volume fits harmoniously into the surrounding cityscape of hutongs, the characteristic urban fabric of the Chinese city in general and Beijing in particular, in which different functions coexist.
Confirmation of Pei's "architectural relativism" was furnished by his project for the headquarters of another Bank of China project built in Hong Kong in 1990, eleven years before the Beijing building.
Here the urban context was completely different and the Sino-American architect could express his most authentic vein with an architectural model, the skyscraper, in which he had received some of his greatest satisfactions, as he himself declared.
The volume stood out markedly in the panorama of the then British protectorate and immediately became the new symbol of its identity.
Built on an irregular and narrow site, at the confluence of an intricate network of streets, the elegant glass tower rises over 300 meters high.
The stone used is principally French gray granite for the exterior and the same material, together with Spanish and Italian marbles (including travertine and Cremo delicato), for the interiors, used to face the plinth of the building.
The artifacts, consisting of solid stonework in the gardens and thick slabs for the facing of the walls and floors, were designed to "anchor" the whole structure to the ground and so help meet the island’s strict regulations to ensure buildings could withstand the stormy winds which lash the region.
The project was unique in Hong Kong because it was exempted from submission to the opinion of the masters of Feng Shui, normally essential in the case of any extensive new development prior to construction.
This was an unusual tribute to the designer, who was allowed to carry out the work without excessive formal requirements.
The same need for representation had earlier inspired another highly successful work, the Arco Tower in Dallas.
This is a forty-nine-story skyscraper intended to represent a rich Texas oil company by a visibly symbolic image and suggest a sense of permanence.
A glittering modern triangular prism, it rises from a trapezoidal base completely faced with gray granite.
The Arco Tower, completed in 1983, is one of the earliest examples of prefabricated stone cladding.
The granite slabs were assembled with a highly industrialized production process, mounted on metal frames in a production facility set up specially for the purpose.
The large cladding panels produced in this way were then trucked to the site, where the workers immediately positioned and installed them.
This produced clear benefits, with enhanced precision in the stonework and shorter completion times for the building.
A very different treatment of an identical theme appears in another company headquarters for Creative Artists Agency in Los Angeles.
Here Pei opted for a building that was "reserved, almost discrete: a classic modernist palazzo" (wrote Paul Goldberg in The New York Times supplement for Sunday, December 17, 1989).
Once again, a difficult, narrow site was the starting point, at the intersection of Wilshire and Santa Monica Boulevards.
Pei solved the problem with a strongly tactile building with two distinctive curved surfaces that interpenetrate to create the entrance to an atrium designed in the architect’s characteristic manner.
The treatment of the travertine here displays an outstanding level of accuracy and elegance in the flush-fitted stonework, the only way to present the volume as a single whole and bring out the expressive qualities of the stone, laid with all the veining running in the same direction.
The public atrium is again the hub of the project. Significantly it was conceived as an essential transit point for those who enter the offices from the parking garage below, with the elevator stopping at this level.
The same striving to create spatially plastic volumes reappears in a fairly recent work, the Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin.
This returned to the challenge of the East Building of the National Gallery of Art by presenting a modern design for an extension to a classical structure.
The result is a museum that you can "explore by an almost Piranesian layering of space, perspectives constantly changing as they rise to each floor by a different means of vertical circulation: first an escalator, then a monumental stair, and finally the glazed spiral stair, offering indoor and outdoor views in all directions as it rotates up to the top floor.
Movement itself becomes an exciting event".
Here, as in the case of Creative Artists Agency, Pei demanded absolute perfection in the fabrication and laying of the material. "Filled joints between the slabs give the building a monolithic, sculptural expression, which is enhanced by solid sculpted pieces at all corners".
Some especially refined details, such as the handrail and rounded hollow scooped out of the French limestone (the same stone used for the Louvre) are traditional motifs that are found in most of his finest works.
They confirm the irreplaceable role of stone in enhancing the value and uniqueness of the spaces where it is located.
Pei’s advanced age presents no obstacle to his work.
In particular, he continues to grapple fervently with the theme of the museum.
Among his most recent creations, the Suzhou Museum in China, in his family’s hometown, and the Museum of Islamic Art in Qatar are confirmation, if it were needed, of his personal working method which continues to favor an analytical approach to design.
And if it was easier for him to work on the Suzhou Museum because of his intimate knowledge of the setting, the Museum of Islamic Art in Qatar was naturally a far more complex and demanding challenge, requiring him to study the country, religion and Islamic architecture.
In the Suzhou Museum, once again, Pei preferred to adopt an approach more respectful of Chinese tradition, drawing inspiration from the local architecture with its distinctive color patterning, as in the white and gray decorative detailing.
An identically colored gray granite helps define the new image of the museum and is used both in the built volumes and the layout of the garden, since China does not observe the distinction which applies in Western architecture between the building and the natural park.
They are simply a single whole and Pei designed the museum in harmony with this tradition, as with the earlier Fragrant Hill Hotel, of which significant traces can be found in the later work.
Before designing and building the museum in Doha, Qatar, Pei traveled and studied for six months, examining the sources and investigating examples to guide him in the design.
He stated that the most fruitful stimuli came from the Ahmad Ibn Tulun mosque in Cairo. The architecture which grew out of this long period of analysis was again heavily dependent on stone (French limestones and American granites).
Pei’s museum is a complex terraced volume of five storys which steps upward from the base to culminate in the central dome 50 meters high.
The galleries housing the art collections, entrusted to another designer, are laid out around the large central atrium.
This space makes spectacular use of precious inlaid marbles, with a single window opening onto the Gulf of Doha and the city skyline, 45 meters high.
The staircase offers an innovative interpretation of the traditional model used by Pei in his previous works, confirming a power of design still ager to meet new challenge.
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