I.M. Pei, the architect who designed the Pyramid of the Louvre, died on May 16, at the age of 102. Pei leaves a vast and diverse architectural heritage spanning several continents, which translates into museums, skyscrapers, libraries and art galleries, and earned him a Pritzker Prize in 1983.
Born in Canton in 1917, he grew up between Hong Kong and Shanghai, following in his father's profession, but it was in the United States where he settled and naturalized and it was in that country that much of his work remains. At Harvard, he was a student of Walter Gropius, one of the founders of the Bauhaus School and a master of modernism, a lineage that includes I.M. Pei, but who continued to develop his own characteristic language. His most iconic work will probably be the Pyramid of the Louvre in Paris, but in Hong Kong there is also the Bank of China building, an iconic silhouette in the city's skyline.
For architect Bruno Soares, the death of Ieoh Ming Pei (known only as I.M. Pei), represents the loss of the "last figure of modernism of the post-war generation." It is at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) that he graduated in Architecture, in the year 1939 and it was World War II that prevented him from returning to China. He entered Harvard University where he completed his master's degree in 1946 and was a student of Walter Gropius, one of the founders of the Bauhaus School and a modernist master. It is in this collective that Pei finds himself, but in a "very unique" way, observes the architect Nuno Soares. "He is indeed a modernist architect, but he has a very unique architecture in this context. He has an architecture that is very unique and very original. He is authorial and has a master trait that is recognized by all," he describes.
"From a disciplinary point of view," continues Nuno Soares, "he was a 'star architect' who always had a very anti-international style attitude." "He always advocated that context is very important in architecture, be it the time, the place, the function, and he always tried to have a language that harmoniously integrated these aspects. We can not speak much of the style of I.M. Pei because his architecture was not a matter of style, it is much more complex than that," he says. It is also the style, or rather the lack of an "identifiable style", which, in the perspective of Bruno Soares, distinguishes Pei's legacy. "The interest in I.M. Pei's work for me is that he has no style. They are works of high quality and very sensitive to the place where they are built and the local culture. It does not have an identifiable style, it is not rigid in prejudices and it is not rigid in approach."
THE CONTROVERSIAL WORK THAT TRANSFORMED INTO A PARISIAN ICON
It is in Paris that we find, what will perhaps become known as the most emblematic work of I.M. Pei. In front of the Louvre Museum stands a glass structure, the pyramid commissioned by the then French President, François Mitterrand, for which he faced the near fury of the French in the face of a project conceptualized by an American, the work of I.M. Pei. The effort paid off, and the pyramid is now one of the symbols of the French capital and, in itself a reason to visit the museum that houses some of the most important works of art in the world. It is exactly the "courage" of Pei in this endeavor that the architect Carlos Marreiros recognizes. "All that treatment, in view of the courage to intervene so closely, the direct intervention in the historical substance without resorting to pastiches and a neo-baroque tracery deserves a very positive recognition," he says.
It is in the Pyramid of the Louvre that Nuno Soares identifies the most emblematic work of I.M. Pei. "It is brilliant from a disciplinary and functional point of view. That pyramid is the entrance that articulates a very vast museum complex that before it took many hours to be travelled, but it is placed exactly in the center and it functionally resolves the entire distribution of the museum. It has that functional architectural brilliance that few works can achieve," says the professor at the University of St. Joseph. The architect also notes the "remarkable building" that is the Bank of China, located in Hong Kong. "It is a tower that we still see today in that towering urban landscape of Hong Kong, because it is one of the most distinctive and elegant."
If in Hong Kong the Bank of China building remained, in Macau, I.M. Pei devised the initial concept of the Science Center, a project that was later developed by the Pei Partnership Architect with Palmer and Turner. Carlos Marreiros acknowledges that this work was created in a "less exciting phase of his, with an architecture less pioneering than that we were accustomed to." Still, he points out, "it is a source of pride for Macau to have a work of his." For Nuno Soares, this building is "really iconic". "It marks the silhouette of the city in a way that is very simple and very elegant. It is a very valuable contribution to Macau's architectural culture, and we are grateful in Macau for the contribution and architectural brilliance of I.M. Pei," he says.
I.M. Pei died at the age of 102, at his home in Manhattan, in the United States. He was married for 72 years to Eileen Pei, who died in 2014, and had four children: three boys and a girl. In 1983, he received the Pritzker Prize, known as the Nobel Prize for Architecture, and was the fifth architect to be awarded this prize. In addition to the Pritzker, he was honoured with the Gold Medal of the American Institute of Architects and the Imperial Prize of Japan.
