What a life I.M. Pei had—and what a contribution he made to architecture and the world’s cities.
The New York-based, Chinese-American architect, who died this week at the ripe old age of 102, brought high-end modernism to the masses with his museums, civic buildings, urban housing and skyscrapers. He even designed beautiful airport control towers like one at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport.
Pei was invariably described as charming, diplomatic, and elegant, a nod to his finely tailored suits and round-rimmed glasses.
He was also fiercely determined, a quality he needed to withstand the firestorm of criticism that greeted his ultimately triumphant 1984 plan to insert a 71-foot-tall glass-and-metal pyramid in the courtyard of the Louvre.
He also could be marvelously self-deprecating. Once, when I interviewed him, he brought up an unfavorable nickname for Chicago’s University Apartments, a pair of 10-story concrete slabs he’d placed in the middle of East 55th Street, unintentionally subjecting residents to pollution from passing cars.
The nickname of that early 1960s project: “Monoxide Alley.” Locals also refer to it as “Monoxide Island.”
Pei could afford to make fun of himself. He won every major honor an architect can win, including the 1983 Pritzker Architecture Prize, the field’s highest honor, awarded by Chicago’s billionaire Pritzker family.
The citation for the prize spoke to his widespread impact: “Ieoh Ming Pei has given this century some of its most beautiful interior spaces and exterior forms. The significance of his work goes far beyond them: for his concern has always been the surroundings in which his buildings would rise.”
Indeed, while Pei is typically celebrated as a creator of buildings that resemble sculptural objects, he also excelled at urban design, particularly in his early career when he worked for the flamboyant New York developer William Zeckendorf.
Even allowing for the car fumes that bothered the residents of University Apartments, it can be observed that Pei and Chicago architect Harry Weese, with whom he worked on the redevelopment of Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood, achieved a significant success. Departing from the urban renewal norm of wiping out existing neighborhoods to make way for isolated housing projects, they wove two- and three-story townhouses into Hyde Park’s urban fabric. In doing so, they laid the groundwork for area’s ongoing revival.
It’s somehow fitting, that Pei died in a year that marks the 100th anniversary of the Bauhaus, the German design school that replaced Victorian clutter and Edwardian pomp with a less formal, clean-lined functionalism.
After fleeing Nazi Germany, Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius became chair of the architecture department at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, from which Pei graduated with a master’s in 1946. The Bauhaus approach suffused Pei’s work, though he ultimately moved beyond it.
The most famous of his buildings — deservedly so — are the Louvre Pyramid, which forms a spectacular entrance to underground galleries Pei added to the once-overstuffed French landmark; the National Gallery of Art’s East Wing, where visitors join with a monumental Calder mobile to animate a sun-washed atrium; and the Bank of China Tower in Hong Kong, whose expressed diagonal structure, like that of Chicago’s former John Hancock Center, braces the building against the wind and supports most of its weight.
Significantly, Pei did not require princely budgets to make construction into art. A prime example is the prototype air traffic control towers he designed for the Federal Aviation Administration in the early 1960s. The O’Hare tower, the tallest of the bunch at 150 feet, combined the basic elements of the prototype — a topside cab, a shaft and a base building — into a thin, gracefully flaring form that anticipated a bell tower Pei would later design in Japan.
The O’Hare tower, built in 1970 alongside the O’Hare Hilton, is still standing and used for monitoring airfield operations, according to Lauren Hoffman, a spokeswoman for the city’s Department of Aviation. A taller tower built in the 1990s became the airport’s main control post.
To be sure, Pei was not a leading thinker, like the mystical Philadelphia architect Louis Kahn, who famously said he’d asked a brick what it wanted to be (the brick supposedly replied: “an arch.”)
Nor was Pei an aesthetic radical, like Los Angeles architect Frank Gehry, who harnessed digital technology to make such exuberant, seemingly chaotic statements as the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain and the Pritzker Pavilion in Millennium Park.
Critics turned thumbs down on some of Pei’s buildings, like the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, which seemed to them a recycled melange of forms Pei already had used.
“Too much of it is shallow, showoff architecture, the kind you see at a world’s fair or a theme park,” Boston Globe architecture critic Robert Campbell wrote of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame when the building opened in 1995. “No real risks have been taken. And that feels wrong for rock.”
Pei’s best designs, however, were as elegant and as quietly forceful as the man himself.
Balancing form and finance, engineering and art, he stretched modernism in new directions, beyond sober functionalism. In the process, helped revitalize cities in America and around the world. That’s quite a legacy, even accounting for such slip-ups as “Monoxide Alley.”
Blair Kamin is a Tribune critic.
Twitter @BlairKamin
