Ieoh Ming
Pei
I.M. Pei in front of the Louvre pyramid model
I.M. Pei
(April 26, 1917 – May 16, 2019), was a well-known master of architecture at home and abroad, an academician of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a foreign academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, and a civil engineering expert. Representative works include the expansion of the Louvre museum in Paris, the Bank of China Tower in Hong Kong, the Fragrant Hills Hotel, and the new Suzhou Museum.
From a rich boy who studied in the United States at the age of 18 to an architect who has a voice in the United States and the world, Pei's life is not only a legendary success story. In fact, looking back on his entire career, he built bridges not only between history and modernity, but also between East and West. As one fellow architect put it, "Pei's architecture is like a wonderful Silk Road in the unpredictable modern world."
The book "Out of the Dust and Smoke of History" published by Unity Publishing House contains precious records compiled by the author Li Jing many years ago based on field interviews, including the author's interviews with Mr. Pei's sons: Pei Jianzhong and Pei Lizhong in the "Pei Architects" in New York. Reading this book allows us to follow in the author's footsteps and learn the story of a family from Suzhou to New York from field interviews.
Today is the 105th anniversary of Mr. Pei's birth, let's look back at the epitome of Mr. Pei's architectural life in the East and the West, and look at this architectural master who exists through the times with architectural works!
Pei
Between things
Master architect I.M. Pei
As Pei grew in fame in the American architectural world, his oriental background and family story became more widely disseminated and known. And his relationship with the mainstream discourse circles of architecture, culture, business and even politics is far or near, or close or close, which also makes his body shrouded in a bit of mystery. Some have described him as "sensitive to the various delicate relationships of power comparable to sonar". Which of Pei's personality are Oriental and which are Western has become one of the topics of small talk for many people who are interested in him.
Since the 1960s, Pei has been self-reliant
"They don't see him as an Asian, but as a talented, sensitive, top designer. But at some point, his oriental background will also have an impact. When HSBC in Hong Kong chose an architect, it also invited I.M. Pei, but he refused. He knew that at that time, Hong Kong was a British colony, and the other side was likely to be British instead of choosing a Chinese. It turned out to be true. So race does have an impact. But he was also invited to act as a judge when Australia chose its capital, and the judgements he made played a big role in the final decision. Huang Huisheng said.
Pei once said to his friend, "I'm very Westernized, that's right. But that's far from the whole story. I know people from both worlds very well and feel comfortable with them. But at the end of the day, there is still a barrier between me and Westerners. Although it was not as thick as the bamboo curtain, this thin barrier finally separated us... The difference between Eastern and Westerners is deeper than the difference between any other race, such as Russians or Middle Easterners, perhaps because our history is too old. Our civilization can be traced back to such a distant era, farther away than any other country..." Pei added a meaningful sentence: "I am much more Chinese than you think, and I guess I did not show this in front of you." I don't know if I did it on purpose. ”
In 1974, Pei returned to his homeland after a gap of nearly forty years; in 1978, Pei was invited to return to China again to make some suggestions for Beijing's urban development and planning.
Pei's early years in China
"At that time, shortly after the beginning of reform and opening up, the Chinese government wanted to develop tourism to earn foreign exchange and hoped to build some new hotels. Mr. Bay was invited to return home. I was the vanguard and arrived in Beijing two or three days early. We vetoed several sites, because building hotels in those places would hurt the original cultural landscape. One day, when I was walking north of Jingshan Park, I realized that although the walls around the Forbidden City were very impressive when viewed from above, if you looked down from a high place, the momentum of the Forbidden City disappeared. Any building that is too tall will make people look at the Forbidden City condescendingly, and if so, an important tourist attraction in China will be destroyed. So I drew a schematic diagram on a piece of paper, asking everyone to stand on the central axis of the extension of the north gate of the Forbidden City, and suggested that high-rise buildings should not be built nearby. When we exchanged notes two or three days later, Mr. Bay saw the idea. The perspective of vision limited by this condition is the policy that Beijing is now implementing near the Forbidden City. Now the line is called the Pei-Cobb-Freed line, or Pei line, because I work for this company, so it's also accurate to call it that. Huang Huisheng said.
"Many major and complex projects have come to Mr. Bay, in part because of his strategies for dealing with relationships and his ability to overcome the most difficult obstacles. He never enters a project without doing a lot of research beforehand, so that he can understand the problem and be able to evaluate them from cultural, historical, political, and social perspectives. Janet Strong said.
In 1990, at the age of 73, Pei retired from the firm, and since then he has taken on a series of small projects in Europe, Asia and the Middle East, all of which he has personally undertaken. "Since 1990, I don't care so much about the shape of the building. Designing a unique architectural shape is no longer difficult for me. To understand what I have done is a great challenge, and I began to study various civilizations. He only took over the projects he was interested in, pursuing an artistic line with less commercial information. His posthumous work has been distributed around the world, including Luxembourg, Germany, the United Kingdom, Japan, China and Qatar. Amazingly, pei in his later years still maintained a strong creativity. Architectural critic Carter Wiseman said: "Pei was a modernist architect with engineering as his roots, but at the same time he more firmly grasped the soul of art and culture. ”
Pei has been called "the last master of modernism," and has been commented upon as having contributed more than any other architect to making modernism the official style of public institutions in the United States. But Pei himself seems to be indifferent to the various labels he wears on his body, and rarely expresses his architectural philosophy and architectural views publicly. When he attended conferences in the architect industry, many architects were keen to express their architectural views and ideas, and even criticize their peers, and Pei almost always did not comment and did not express his own views. This also caused dissatisfaction among some of his fellow architects, who said he was sleek and sophisticated. But Pei simply said, "I don't belong to any genre, nor am I involved in any architectural movement, attracting and gathering followers, especially young architects, so that I can become a branded architect, that's not my direction." ”
"Pei doesn't have a fixed style, which means he doesn't start a project with the preconceived notion of 'what this building should be' or 'what materials should be used'. For decades, he continued to be somewhat persistent and pure, never joining the fashion trends of postmodernism, deconstructionism, or other 20th-century 'isms'. On the contrary, he insisted on the aesthetic of modernism and the consistent geometric logic, very precise. 'Geometry' is a tool, not a purpose. In Janet Strong's eyes, Pei is not a theorist who is talking about it, but more like a philosopher with a basic discourse. Perhaps, Pei gave everything about himself to his work to explain, "he believed that his architecture could speak for itself."
The above graphic content is excerpted from the fragment of "Becoming I.M. Pei" in "Out of the Dust and Smoke of History".