Photograph: Tara Todras-Whitehill/New York Times Inside the Islamic Museum of Art, designed by IM Pei, in Doha, Qatar. Photograph: Tamara Abdul Hadi/New York Times The Museum of Islamic Art in Doha, Qatar, designed by IM Pei. Photograph: David Ahntholz/New York Times The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and Museum, designed by IM Pei, in Cleveland, Ohio.
#LOUVRE PYRAMID ARCHITECT SERIES#
They were the first in a series of museums he designed that would come to include the East Building in Washington (1978) and the Louvre pyramid (1989), as well as the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland. Among these were the US National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, completed in 1967, and the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, New York, and the Des Moines Art Center in Iowa, both finished in 1968. The firm became fully independent from Webb & Knapp in 1960, by which time Pei was winning commissions for major projects that had nothing to do with Zeckendorf.
All were notable for their gridded concrete facades. In its early years IM Pei & Associates mainly executed projects for Zeckendorf, including Kips Bay Plaza in New York, finished in 1963 Society Hill Towers in Philadelphia (1964) and Silver Towers in New York (1967).
IM Pei (right) with William Zeckendorf, Michael Oh, the architect Frank Williams, and Robert H Burns around a model of a design for the Four Seasons Hotel in New York in 1989. The Kips Bay Towers, designed by IM Pei, in New York in 1980. Pei quickly found himself engaged in the design of high-rise buildings, and he used that experience as a springboard to establish his own firm, IM Pei & Associates, which he set up in 1955 with Henry Cobb and Eason Leonard, the team he had assembled at Webb & Knapp. Pei, who was born in China and moved to the United States in the 1930s, was hired by the US property developer William Zeckendorf in 1948, shortly after he received his graduate degree in architecture from Harvard, to oversee the design of buildings produced by Zeckendorf’s firm, Webb & Knapp.
What he valued most in architecture, he said, was that it “stand the test of time”. Pei remained a committed modernist, and although none of his buildings could be called old fashioned or traditional, his brand of modernism – clean, reserved, sharp edged and unapologetic in its use of simple geometries and its aspirations to monumentality – sometimes seemed to be a throwback, at least when compared with the latest architectural trends. And all his work, from his commercial skyscrapers to his art museums, represented a careful balance of the cutting edge and the conservative. He was 102.īest known for designing the glass pyramid at the entrance to the Louvre Museum, in Paris, and the East Building of the American National Gallery of Art, in Washington, DC, Pei was one of the few architects who were equally attractive to real-estate developers, corporate chieftains and art-museum boards (the third group, of course, often made up of members of the first two). IM Pei, who began his long career designing buildings for a New York real-estate developer and ended it as one of the most revered architects in the world, died early on Thursday, at his home in Manhattan.
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