A Groundbreaking Exhibition Reveals the Many Layers of I.M. Pei

The new M+ show on I.M. Pei is full of fascinating artefacts, but Aric Chen still thinks about the one that got away. In 2019, he was in New York with curator Shirley Surya to visit the archives of Pei Cobb Freed and Partners, looking for interesting material about the renowned architect. At the time, Chen had recently left his position as the first lead curator for design and architecture at M+, with Surya stepping into the role as successor. Together, they were laying the groundwork for the world’s first retrospective exhibition on Pei and his long career.

Pei Cobb Free’s archivist, Janet Adams Strong, was helping them navigate the collection when she mentioned something intriguing. “She informed us very excitedly that one of the engineers Pei worked with had discovered this whole set of concrete samples, like sand and aggregates for concrete,” recalls Chen. “Apparently there were dozens and dozens of vials of different shades and textures. That just seemed like such a cool albeit nerdy thing that really spoke to the rigour of Pei’s work, his attention to detail and that sense of refinement he sought. That’s something most people won’t ever think about – concrete is concrete. But it isn’t.”

There was just one problem: nobody could find the samples. “Somehow they went missing,” says Chen. Luckily, they found plenty of other material, much of which forms the backbone of I.M. Pei: Life is Architecture, which opened last month and will run at M+ until January 5, 2025. But the missing concrete samples speak to something unexpected in Pei’s career. Despite his public notoriety — he was a starchitect before the term was even invented — his work has long been overlooked and under-researched by academics and curators. Pei left behind some of the world’s most recognisable structures, including the Louvre pyramid and the Bank of China Tower in Hong Kong, and yet the real significance of his architecture has gone largely unexplored. 

“As an architect he was quite famous throughout his lifetime,” says Chen. “He didn’t suffer for lack of acknowledgement or lack of celebrity. You don’t get clients like Jackie Kennedy and François Mitterand without having some kind of profile. But I think people mostly knew him for his more monumental buildings and his use of geometries. There hadn’t been a really in depth exploration of the many other facets of his career.”

Until now. Life is Architecture builds on nearly a decade of work by Chen, Surya and their team. Starting with a symposium they helped organise in 2017 at the University of Hong Kong and Harvard University, and now culminating in the M+ exhibition and an associated book, the curators have prompted a reassessment of Pei – not only as he the designer of many remarkable buildings, but also as a transcultural figure who worked his entire life to reconcile the globalising influence of modernism with respect for local conditions. 

Pei was born in 1917, in Guangzhou, to a wealthy and well-educated family with roots in Suzhou. His mother Lien Kwun was an artist and flautist of some renown, and his father Tsuyee Pei had just started working for the Bank of China; he would eventually rise in rank to become its general manager and a governor of China’s central bank. The family moved to Hong Kong a year after I.M. Pei’s birth and he attended St. Paul’s College before moving once again, this time to Shanghai. This was a formative time for Pei, who witnessed the construction of grand edifices along the Bund, while also visiting Suzhou’s ancient gardens with his family.

Pei family portrait in the garden of Tsuyee Pei’s house, which belonged to the Bank of China, on Route Ferguson (now Wukang Road) in Shanghai’s French Concession. I.M. Pei is third from left. 1935. Photo courtesy Patricia Pei, via M+

Growing up in Shanghai, Pei had become fascinated by Hollywood movies, and he later said this was a major reason why he decided to study in the United States. In 1935, he took a steamship to San Francisco and then a train to Philadelphia, where he began studying architecture at the University of Pennsylvania. According to biographer Carter Wiseman, Pei was fascinated by the modern architecture that was being designed by architects like Le Corbusier, and was disappointed that his professors in Philadelphia were focused on the neo-classical styles of the Beaux-Arts tradition. He decided to transfer to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he enrolled in engineering before later transferring back to architecture. 

Pei finally got his chance to explore his modernist impulses when he began his graduate studies at Harvard. Among his professors was Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus School in Germany, which had developed a notion of architecture as a union of art, craft and engineering that had an emphasis on humanistic, functional design. After he was exiled by the Nazi regime, which shut down the Bauhaus in 1933, Gropius espoused a universal approach to design that would eventually become known as the International Style. And while Pei was enthralled by the minimalist, functional form of such architecture, he recognised its limits and sought to develop a framework in which a modernist architectural language could be used to express regional and cultural particularities.

This would eventually become one of the defining elements of Pei’s career. The Fragrant Hill Hotel in Beijing (1983), the Bank of China Tower (1989) and the Suzhou Museum (2006) all reflect elements of traditional Chinese architecture, landscape design and literary culture. The Museum of Islamic Art in Doha (2008), one of Pei’s last projects, is an ethereal reinterpretation of traditional Islamic architecture. But it wasn’t until Chen and Surya began their investigation that it became clear how deep the roots of this cultural sensitivity were in Pei’s thinking. 

His graduate thesis — praised by Gropius and other faculty members — was a design for a hypothetical art museum in Shanghai that incorporated elements of classical Chinese gardens. “I knew about some of his later projects where he combined modernist vocabulary with local cultural syntaxes,” says Chen. “But I didn’t realise this started out with his graduate thesis at Harvard. If you take all of that you can position him as this transcultural global figure before we were ever talking about transculturalism or globalism. You realise just how towering of a figure he was.”

Despite his interest in combining modernism with traditional Chinese influences, Pei did not intend to return to China. Soon after moving to the United States, he wrote to his father in English: “I don’t think I shall feel strange in a strange land.” In the context of war and instability back home in China, Pei was committed to becoming American and reshaping his adopted home. 

In 1948, after graduating from Harvard, Pei was hired by New York City real estate tycoon William Zeckendorf, and for the next seven years he worked on major development projects that managed to be insightful and innovative even if they were driven primarily by profit. It was thanks to this collaboration with Zeckendorf that he began exploring new ways of using concrete – hence all the samples that somehow got lost in the archives. “He really started working on this in Kips Bay which was initially built as an affordable housing complex in New York,” says Chen. “He started thinking about elegant forms and finishes in a much more economical way.”

This was the era of large-scale urban renewal, when American policymakers, planners and real estate developers were keen to sweep away the cityscape of the past for a bright new future. Decades later, after so much historic fabric had been destroyed for expressways, public housing estates and megaprojects, urban renewal came to be a dirty word. (Renowned urbanist Jane Jacobs succeeded in blocking a Zeckendorf project that would have wiped out a large part of the West Village, today one of the most prized neighbourhoods in New York.) Pei might later have regretted some of the era’s excesses; he was influential in convincing the Beijing government to reject high-rise development in his historic centre.

But even if urban renewal had many failures, Pei’s projects with Zeckendorf were among the era’s most successful. “Zeckendorf and Pei imagined, designed, and built large-scale urban projects imbued with substantive architecture, mixed in use, technological and financial ingenuity, a distinct modernist aesthetic, and bold new thinking about how people should live, work, move around, and entertain themselves in cities,” wrote architectural historian Marci M. Clark in a 2017 doctoral dissertation for the City University of New York. 

Zeckendorf encouraged Pei’s ambition. “Money is a dirty word in architecture, but it’s because of this real estate world and the visionary developer he worked with that he was able to dream big,” says Surya. That was true even if his designs didn’t always come to fruition. In 1956, Pei designed what he called the Hyperboloid, an 80-storey hourglass-shaped tower with exposed structural supports, which would have replaced New York’s famed Grand Central Terminal. (“We don’t have to look back on this unbuilt project too wistfully, even if it was an incredible proposal,” says Chen.) Deemed too expensive, it instead gave way to the more stolid PanAm Building, designed by Walter Gropius, Richard Roth and Pietro Belluschi and built above the rear part of the historic train terminus.

But the Hyperboloid was emblematic of Pei’s ambition and creativity, and a precursor to some of the masterpieces he would later create after launching his own architectural practice in 1955. (He continued working with Zeckendorf for many years afterwards.) Pei caught the attention of high-profile clients like Jackie Kennedy, who hired him to design the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston, as well as large corporations and institutions around the world. He corporate skyscrapers, but also university buildings, art museums, government facilities and public spaces; he was prolific and varied in his work. 

One thing that unites much of it is what Surya calls an underappreciated aspect of Pei’s work: his capacity for holistic thinking that saw his buildings as part of a much bigger context. That could be a cultural context, but more often than not it also meant the urban context. Surya points to the Louvre pyramid as an example. Commissioned by French president François Mitterrand as part of a restructuring and expansion of the renowned Musée du Louvre — home of the Mona Lisa — the pyramid was met by controversy when its design was unveiled in 1984. A New York Times story the following year summed up the criticism: “An architectural joke, an eyesore, an anachronistic intrusion of Egyptian death symbolism in the middle of Paris, and a megalomaniacal folly.”

More than an exercise in form-making, however, it was actually just the tip of an architectural iceberg. The pyramid acts as an iconic new entrance and skylight to a subterranean circulation network that revolutionised the way people could move through the ancient palace, which had previously been partitioned between different uses, with a variety of entrances. “That’s a very urban approach” that recalls the many large projects Pei worked on with Zeckendorf, says Surya. 

This is the kind of nuanced analysis that visitors to Life is Architecture can expect. But for all the years of research, it’s not a drily academic kind of exhibition. There are photos, sketches and letters Pei wrote back to his family in China when he was a student. There is also a room full of videos about Pei’s work from throughout the years, a treasure trove of which Surya and Chen found buried in the Pei Cobb Freed archives. And perhaps most memorably there are five large-scale models of Pei’s buildings created by architecture students at the University of Hong Kong and Chinese University of Hong Kong. “It was really challenging because Pei was so precise in his design, it was hard to emulate everything,” says Surya. “But we wanted people to experience what it’s like to go inside [his buildings].” 

Pei, who died in 2019 at the age of 102, was never one to intellectualise his own work. One of the reasons he has never had a retrospective until now is because he always thought people could learn everything they needed to know from visiting his buildings. But there is more to the man and his architecture than meets the eye. “He’s famous for his masterful museums and other buildings,” says Chen. “He created really incredible buildings of sublime beauty and monumentality. He always sought a kind of civic permanence in his work. In many ways he personifies the story of the 20th century.”