I. M. Pei

I. M. Pei (1917- ), Chinese-American architect, one of the most innovative and prolific 20th-century architects. His work represents a fusion of a classical concern for elegance of form with a contemporary concern for functional efficiency.

Born in Canton, China, on April 26, 1917, Pei emigrated to the United States in 1935; he studied architecture at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University. From 1945 to 1948 he taught at Harvard. In 1956 he established his own firm, I. M. Pei & Partners, which has been responsible for some of the largest municipal and corporate constructions of the mid-20th century, in the United States and abroad. The firm is noted for its rational and sensitive handling of a wide variety of design problems. His massive urban projects in Montreal (Place Ville-Marie, 1961) and Denver, Colorado (Mile High Center, 1955), for example, are multi-purpose complexes of plazas and high-rise buildings that retain a sense of classical order in their axial arrangement. The John Hancock Tower (1973, Boston) is clad in blue-green mirrored glass to provide a reflective environment for the historic Copley Square directly below it. The East Building of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (1978), is a striking trapezoidal structure of triangular wings, skylights, and knife-edged fins. Pei's largest projects to date include the design of the immense Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in New York (begun 1980; opened 1986) and a rebuilding programme for the Musée du Louvre, in Paris, begun in 1984 and completed in 1989. He was awarded the highly regarded Pritzker Prize for Architecture in 1983.