At the time of the recent opening of Cleveland’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum—or, rather, the I. M. Pei–designed Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum, as it was invariably called—I heard a radio interview with one of the museum officials, who was asked about the famous architect. “Wasn’t it odd that Mr. Pei, who is a self-proclaimed lover of classical music and who doesn’t listen to rock and roll, was chosen to be the designer?” asked the interviewer. “Not at all,” answered the official, “we specifically wanted him because we knew that the Pei name would be recognized and would give credibility to the whole project.”
There are not many contemporary American architects who bring that sort of cachet. Philip Johnson, perhaps, or Frank Gehry. But Johnson, despite his celebrity, has never received a commission for a national civic monument; neither (yet) has Gehry. Pei, on the other hand, had designed two of them: the East Building of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the overhaul of the Louvre Museum in Paris. One can debate the architectural merits of both projects, but the East Building is immensely popular with visitors (although less so with the curators), and the refurbished and enlarged Louvre is widely favored by Parisians. Moreover, the glass pyramid that Pei installed in the Louvre’s Cour Napoléon seems destined to become a landmark as recognizable as the Eiffel Tower or the Arc de Triomphe.
Yet Pei is not universally admired in the architectural world. Although his office has been the training ground for dozens of talented architects, including William Pedersen, Ulrich Franzen, and James Polshek, as well as Henry Cobb and James Ingo Freed, who became his partners, there aren’t any Pei disciples, as there were Mies van der Rohe disciples or Louis Kahn disciples. Nor does there appear to be a Pei philosophy of design. “He’s not a design influence,” Philip Johnson told Michael Cannell, the author of a new biography of Pei, “he’s just Mr. Success.” Ralph Lerner, dean of Princeton’s architecture school, was even less charitable: “He’s irrelevant. There’s no body of theory that goes along with his work.”
Why is the best-known architect in America, who has been commissioned to build some of the most important buildings here and abroad, not also acclaimed by his peers? Is this a reflection of the shallowness of modern celebrity, or is it, perhaps, an indictment of the rest of the architectural profession, which has grown increasingly estranged from the values of the public it purports to serve and is more interested in a “body of theory” than in accomplished buildings? Pei’s buildings are undecorated, sleek, and impeccably detailed—the architectural equivalent of a Mercedes-Benz. Throughout his career, Pei has been a steadfast architectural modernist, even during the 1970s and 1980s, when modernism became distinctly unfashionable. Nevertheless, although postmodern design was supposed to be more accessible and more user-friendly, it was the modernist Pei’s buildings that were popular with the public and equally popular with a series of distinguished patrons: Jacqueline Kennedy, Paul Mellon, J. Carter Brown, and François Mitterrand. How does Pei manage to turn cool modernism into such hot stuff?
Cannell struggles mightily with this question, and if he doesn’t quite provide a satisfactory answer, he does give the reader many useful and interesting insights into the way that architecture is practiced today. Cannell is a journalist, not an architectural critic, and he sometimes seems unsure of his subject, which causes him to lean on outsiders’ opinions as regards Pei’s design ability. This produces many one-liners, such as the catty comments cited above, but unfortunately it doesn’t produce a coherent analysis of the work.
On the other hand, Cannell is a conscientious reporter, and he describes the actual business of architecture (and architecture at the level practiced by Pei, or any major architect, is a business) thoroughly and engagingly. This book provides a clearer description of how large commercial buildings get designed and built than any other I have read. Although Pei will probably be best remembered for his museums, he has also built formidable office buildings, like the John Hancock Tower in Boston and the Bank of China Tower in Hong Kong, currently the world’s tallest structure outside the United States.
It was in the hard school of commercial architecture that Pei cut his teeth. Between 1948 and 1960, he was the house architect at Webb & Knapp, the giant real estate company run by William Zeckendorf. This was the period of downtown urban renewal, and Webb & Knapp built apartment and office towers in almost every city on the continent: New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Washington, Boston, Denver, and Montreal. Pei and his assistants designed them all.
It was not easy to manage a transition from successful commercial architect to high-fashion architect, but Pei managed it as smoothly as he had earlier transformed himself from an effete Harvard professor to Zeckendorf’s golden boy. Pei had been a graduate student at Harvard under Walter Gropius, who was so impressed with the young Chinese émigré that he offered him a teaching job. Pei’s presence in the United States was something of an accident. Born in Suzhou and raised in Shanghai, Ieoh Ming Pei was the son of a prosperous banker and was sent to America to study architecture. He graduated from MIT in 1940, but by then China had been invaded by Japan, and his father counseled him to stay where he was. He enrolled in Harvard and, when America entered the war, interrupted his studies to volunteer to serve with a wartime intelligence agency. When Pei finally graduated from Harvard in 1945, China was in the midst of a civil war, and he was still stuck abroad. By 1949, with the Communists victorious, it became clear that for Pei there would be no going back. America would be his home.
Pei’s professional life has had ups and downs. His decision to work for Zeckendorf marked him in the eyes of many of his colleagues as a talented commercial hack, a reputation he would work hard to reverse. One project, the Kennedy Library in Boston, dragged on for years, the focus of local community protest. The Hancock Tower suffered an embarrassing and well-publicized technical failure (eventually, all the windows had to be replaced). The Louvre commission was a cultural minefield and almost didn’t get built. Throughout, the architect persevered. Evidently, Pei is an exceptional person, yet he is so withdrawn and impenetrable—Cannell was given very little access to his subject—that he remains almost a bystander in his own biography. This book is a satisfactory exploration of the background of Pei’s professional achievements, but it’s “too bad,” as Philip Johnson is quoted as saying, “one can’t grasp the man himself.”
Though officially retired, Pei returned to the public eye in the first decade of the twenty-first century with three acclaimed museums, in his hometown of Suzhou, in Qatar, and in Japan. A revealing 2010 PBS documentary, I. M. Pei: Building China Modern, features an engaging and almost garrulous nonagenarian, whose cogent explanations of his designs make it clear that while not founded in theory, his work is most certainly grounded in architectural ideas.