Life and work of I.M Pei

Early Life

I.M Pei was born in Canton, China on April 26, 1917, to a wealthy family. His father, a banker, was later the director of the Bank of China. His family moved to the city of Shanghai, but later resided in Suzhou, a city near Shanghai. The family’s residence was in a renowned garden Suzhou, now part of the world heritage site listed as the classical gardens of Suzhou. The family’s house was called the Lion Forest, and consisted of many rock sculptures carved naturally by water. Pei loved how the buildings and nature combined, and especially liked the way light and the shadows mixed.

Education

His education was at St. Paul’s College, Hong Kong and then at Saint John’s University, Shanghai before moving to the United States to study architecture at the age of eighteen in the University of Pennsylvania. He received his Bachelor of Architecture degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1940. He was a 1940 recipient of the Alpha Rho Chi Medal, the MIT traveling fellowship, and the AIA Gold Medal. He then studied at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Shortly after his studies there, he became a member of the National Defense Research Committee in Princeton, New Jersey.

In 1944, Pei retuned to Harvard, studying under Walter Gropius, who was previously associated with the Bauhaus style of architecture. He received a Masters degree in Architecture in 1946. He was a member of the Harvard faculty subsequently attaining the rank of assistant professor. He received the Wheelwright Traveling Fellowship in 1951 and became a naturalized citizen in the United States of America.

Early Works and Style of Architecture

His first professional experience was with the celebrated city planner-developer William Zeckendorf, for whom he designed a large-scale public housing projects across the country. In 1955 he founded his own firm “I.M. Pei and Associates” which later became “I.M. Pei and Partners” in 1966 and later “Pei Cobb Free and Partners” in 1989, I.M. Pei's reputation was secure and public in a way given to only a few architects at any one time. Rigours, logic, fine materials, and a humane rendering of modernism remarked his work, a detailed perfection of execution marks his work, and above all, by a concern for the people who use his spaces. Critic’s say his works aren’t driven by a new theory, that he’s has and that essentially he represents an elegant end of the road to the school of modernism defined more than three generations earlier. However, the enduring nature of Pei's shapes, images, and his solutions, would seem to argue against the critics.

Mr. Pei's personal architectural style blossomed with his design for the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado (1961–67). He later gained broad national attention with the East Building of the National Gallery of Art in Washington (1968–78) and the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston (1965-79) — two of some thirty institutional projects executed by Mr. Pei. Others include churches, hospitals, and municipal buildings, as well as schools, libraries, and over a dozen museums. His most recent works include the Morton H. Myerson Symphony Center in Dallas, the Grand Louvre in Paris, the Miho Museum in Shiga, Japan, the Schauhaus at the German Historical Museum in Berlin, and the Musée d'Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean in Luxembourg. Among Mr. Pei's skyscraper designs are the 72-story Bank of China Tower in Hong Kong and the Four Seasons Hotel in midtown Manhattan. He has completed two projects in his native China: the Fragrant Hill Hotel in Beijing (1982) and the Suzhou Museum in Suzhou (2006), each designed to graft advanced technology onto the roots of indigenous building and thereby sow the seed of a new, distinctly Chinese form of modern architecture.

Monumental works

One of I.M Pei biggest works was the louvre pyramid in Paris. The Louvre Museum (French: Musée du Louvre) in Paris, France, is the most visited and one of the oldest, largest, and most famous art galleries and museums in the world. The Louvre has a long history of artistic and historic conservation, inaugurated in the Capetian dynasty until today. The building was previously a royal palace and is famous for holding several of the world's most beautiful works of art, such as Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa, The Virgin and Child with St. Anne, Madonna of the Rocks, and Alexandros of Antioch's Venus de Milo. Located in the centre of the city of Paris, between the Rive Droite of the Seine and the irue de Rvoli in the Ier arrondissement, it is accessed by the Palais Royal — Musée du Louvre Metro station. The equestrian statue of Louis XIV constitutes the starting point axe historique, but the palace is not aligned on this axis.
With a record 8.3 million visitors received in 2006,[1] the Louvre is by far the most visited culture and art museum in the world. It is also the most visited monument in Paris.
The second building that I.M Pei was really proud of which is the national gallery of art building in Washington D.C, This museum is such a treasure. Housing one of the world's foremost collections of Western painting, sculpture, and graphic arts, from the Middle Ages into the 21st century, the National Gallery has a dual personality. The original West Building, designed by John Russell Pope (architect of the Jefferson Memorial and the National Archives), is a neoclassic marble masterpiece with a domed rotunda over a colonnaded fountain and high-ceilinged corridors leading to delightful garden courts. At its completion in 1941, the building was the largest marble structure in the world. It was a gift to the nation from financier/philanthropist Andrew W. Mellon, who also contributed the nucleus of the collection, including 21 masterpieces from the Hermitage, two Raphael’s among them. The modern East Building designed by I. M. Pei and opened in 1978, is composed of two adjoining triangles with glass walls and lofty tetrahedron skylights. The pink Tennessee marble from which both buildings were constructed was taken from the same quarry; it forms an architectural link between the two structures. Only a small percentage of the National Gallery's collection of 109,000 works is on display at one time.

The last work of I.M Pei that I studied is Bank of China (BOC) Tower is located at No.1, Garden Road, a flourishing centre of activity in Hong Kong's business and financial core. The building was constructed over a period of four years and four months commencing in April 1985. Completed for occupancy in August 1989, the building was opened in May 1990, towering 70 floors above the ground floor level and offering parking in four basement levels. The tower structure of 315 meters and two masts of 50 odd meters give the building its aspiring height of 367.4 meters – which, in 1989, made it the tallest in Hong Kong as well as the fifth by height in the world. It is still one of the tallest office buildings in Hong Kong.