Born in China in 1917, the architect made history under the Europeanized name I. M. Pei, although closer to the truth is Yu Ming Pei's version. He seemed not to have been touched by the storms of the 20th century: the son of a major banker left his homeland in 1935, even before the start of the Sino-Japanese War, and in the United States, where he went to study, his participation in World War II was limited to three years of work for the state as a designer. He studied both traditional architecture in the spirit of the Paris School of Fine Arts of the late 19th century, and the latest ideas, having met Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer. But we can assume that the most important school for him was the work of the head of the architectural department in the development company Webb & Knapp, where in 1948-1955 he was engaged in large projects in the United States and Canada.
It's about his ability to take into account the economic side of any project and coordinate it with the architectural component, including the sharply modern, as well as skillfully work with the customer, which helped Pay to realize the most daring and large-scale ideas, and also gradually reach a very high level of demand - at the level heads of state, as in the case of the reconstruction of the Louvre and François Mitterrand, or the Kennedy family.
Pei, however, was also interested in tradition, including his historical homeland: it was in this spirit that he completed the project of the Xiangshan Hotel (Fragrant Hill) in Beijing - the first construction by a foreign architect in China since the liberalization of the economy in 1978 (Pei became a US citizen in 1954).
During his long life, Pei was awarded with all the honors possible for an architect - and a public figure -. In 1990, he officially retired, but worked until the second half of the 2000s, including in collaboration with his sons-architects, and not in his firm, today called Pei Cobb Freed & Partners.
