American architect of Chinese origin, J. M. Pei (a more accurate rendering of his name in Cyrillic - Yu Ming Pei) celebrates its 100th birthday on April 26, 2017. Officially retired since 1990, he continues to collaborate with his former workshop, Pei Cobb Freed, and his sons' office, Pei Partnership Architects. Among his awards are the AIA Gold Medals (1979), RIBA (2010), the International Union of Architects (2014), the Pritzker Prize (1983), the first architectural Praemium Imperiale (1989). He is an officer of the Legion of Honor (1993), a member of the Institut de France (1984) and the British Royal Academy (1993).
Its buildings are no less noticeable: the reconstruction of the Louvre (two stages - 1989 and 1993), including the glass pyramid that has become one of the symbols of Paris, the no less original eastern wing of the National Gallery (1971-1978) in the heart of the US capital, the J. F. Kennedy (1977–1979, Boston) in a bold black and white tint, the Bank of China (1989) skyscraper is one of the "brightest" in Hong Kong. In the projects of the last decades, J. M. Pei often refers to traditional forms - as in the museum in Suzhou (2006) or the museum of Islamic art in the capital of Qatar (2008). However, all his buildings are distinguished by the bold use of simple geometric shapes: in his projects this does not seem primitive, an obvious solution - they are never boring.
However, Pei's path to fame - and to the international establishment - was not the most direct one. He was born in Canton (Guangzhou) to a banker family. In 1935, he left for the United States to study architecture there: he entered the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, then transferred to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, where teaching was in the spirit of the Paris School of Fine Arts of the 19th century - a trend that lingered in the United States. Then Pei studied at the School of Design at Harvard University in Boston (1942–46) with Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer: there Pei was already criticized for his interest in tradition. During the war years, when architects were widely recruited by the American authorities, he served on the National Defense Research Committee. In the late 1940s, instead of one of the interesting and / or successful architectural bureaus, he chose the construction company Webb & Knapp as his place of work: there he became the head of the architectural department and was able to design many objects very enviable for a beginner professional, for example, a skyscraper Place Ville-Marie in Montreal (project - 1953, implementation - 1962). Having gained experience and connections, in 1955 J. M. Pei opened his own workshop in New York, where he expanded his repertoire of forms and genres.
