82 The EconomistJune 1st 2019
W
hen in1984 I.M.Pei, then the most sought-after architect in
America, presented his plans for a 70-foot glass pyramid in
the 18th-century courtyard of the Louvre, the general reaction was
outrage. This was an atrocity; it was “an annex to Disneyland”. Be-
cause Mr Pei was Chinese-American, a foreigner twice over, he
clearly had no understanding of the Louvre, or Paris, or France.
These remarks did not annoy him. As a man of courtesy and
cultivation, with quick enthusiasms and wide, wide smiles, he
took them in his stride. But he was surprised. He had been asked to
design a new entrance for the museum and, instead of adding on
some utilitarian concrete block, had created a great welcoming
space: put a swirling staircase underground and capped it with a
glow of transparency and light that did not touch, let alone hurt,
the old ornamented façades. In short, he had taken his usual care.
He had also expressed, once again, his two great passions in ar-
chitecture. The first, as befitted a true modernist trained at mitand
Harvard, was for simple geometric forms, triangle, circle and
square. On these he based all his buildings, which included the
East Building of the National Gallery in Washington, the Kennedy
Library in Boston, the Museum of Art at Cornell, the Bank of China
Tower in Hong Kong and the Museum of Islamic Art in Dubai.
Slopes, as in rhomboids and trapezoids, delighted him; pyramids
pleased him for their perfect stability. And when he dreamed of
one in the Louvre—for he always did the dreaming, while asso-
ciates did the drawing—it fitted exactly, to his mind, with the love
of geometry and rationality that he saw everywhere in Paris.
His other firm conviction was that architecture had to mirror
life. So for the Mesa Laboratory at the National Centre for Atmo-
spheric Research (ncar) in Boulder, Colorado he hiked among the
sandstone hills, finding inspiration for his sculptural, reddish,
thick-walled towers in Native-American cliff-dwellings. His City
Hall in Dallas, a boldly cantilevered wedge of glass and steel facingthe commercial district, reflected the vaunting Texan pride he
found there. He built the Kennedy Library to evoke the man, and its
towering empty spaceframe, flooded with light and hung with an
American flag, summed up both limitless optimism and the coun-
try’s loss. For the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, a tower
with a pyramid protruding and a wedge driven through it, he pre-
pared his mind by venturing, for the first time, to rock concerts. For
his Doha commission he studied Islam and explored the Islamic
world, discovering his dome-and-cube ideal in the oldest mosque
in Cairo. And when considering the Louvre he impishly took a cue
from Napoleon’s fascination with the pyramids on the Nile.
Regard for tradition and context did not ward off the doubters,
but it helped. So did his punctiliousness about finish and materi-
als. Everything had to be built well: built to last, and to be beautiful.
His trademark lattices of glass were devised to admit as much light
as possible, sometimes by angling the thousands of crystalline fac-
ets, sometimes by connecting them with rods so thin they were
more like a spiderweb. Stone, too, was chosen to pick up the chang-
ing colours of daylight: creamy limestone, as at Doha, or the pale
pink Tennessee marble he used for the East Building. But everyday
concrete could also be refined to his purposes by matching its col-
our consistently to local earth, bush-hammering the ncar slabs so
that they resembled weathered rocks, and avoiding visible joins.
One of his designs for William Zeckendorf, the flamboyant New
York property developer who employed him in the 1950s, was the
Kips Bay Plaza housing project, two square grids in pre-cast con-
crete which were meant to revitalise a blighted neighbourhood. He
softened them with arched and recessed windows until they
looked like honeycombs. Architecture could heal, too.
Once Jackie Kennedy had daringly picked him to build her hus-
band’s library in 1964, he became such a feature of America’s cul-
tural scene, owlishly sipping his favourite red Bordeaux, that it was
easy to forget that only the rise of the communists in China had
kept him in America at all. He had come to study in 1934, lured
mostly by the films of Bing Crosby and Betty Grable, and had fun.
But he was keen to go back until it became too risky for a banker’s
son to do so. He therefore took American citizenship, but did not
cut the roots. His wife was Chinese; his children had Chinese
names. And his imagination had been shaped less by Le Corbusier
or Walter Gropius, though he met and admired both men, than by
his family’s ancient gardens at Suzhou in Jiangsu. There, as a child,
he would wander winding paths through fantastic rocks towards
pavilions, unconsciously absorbing sightlines and approaches,
light and shadow, as well as the framing of views. He did not forget.The bamboo growing
In 1974 he managed to return; later he built, for the government, a
hotel complex at Fragrant Hill outside Beijing. He seized on this as
a chance to wean the Chinese away from their drab eastern Euro-
pean blocks and back to the domestic traditions they had lost. But
their break with the past had been too definite; they now wanted to
copy the West, and did not care for the old motifs he combined
with his geometry and glass. He did better with the Bank of China
Tower for the bank his father had run, where his shaft of 70 slim,
dark storeys, criss-crossed with white lines, was based on the an-
gular growth of bamboo. Visiting shrines in the mountains once in
childhood, he thought he heard the bamboo growing.
Those mountains, like the gardens, led him to seek tranquillity
in the buildings he designed. They sometimes seemed too exciting
for that: sweeping stairways, soaring glass, razor-sharp angles,
scintillating slopes. But at their heart lay those perfect forms, tri-
angle, circle and square. Water often lay nearby, offering both tran-
sparency and reflection. A pyramid with water round it, as at the
Louvre, was the very essence of serenity: harmony of structure and
spirit. It might take time to make its case; architecture was a slow
art. But as it moved from newness to permanence, he felt beaming-
ly sure that Parisians would agree with him. 7Ieoh Ming (I.M.) Pei, architect, died on May 16th, aged 102His light materials
Obituary I.M.Pei