I. M. Pei (Credit: Getty Images)
Shanghai-born architect I.M. Pei died on Wednesday at the age of 102.
The Pritzker Prize-winning architect emigrated to the U.S. in the 1930s and completed studies in engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and, later, attended Harvard’s Graduate School of Design.
For most of his life, Pei called New York City home and famously worked in-house with one of the city’s most prominent developers, William Zeckendorf, in the late 1940s. He worked for Zeckendorf’s firm, Webb & Knapp, until he founded his own practice in 1955 with partners Henry Cobb and Eason Leonard. The firm is now known as Pei Cobb Freed & Partners. Cobb is the only original founder still living.
Pei designed global icons including the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha, Qatar, the Louvre Museum’s famous glass pyramid and Hong Kong’s Bank of China Tower.
At home in New York, he designed affordable housing complex Kips Bay Plaza in the 1960s, Silver Towers in New York in 1967, the Javits Convention Center in the 1980s, and, more recently, Century Properties’ luxury condominium, the Centurion.
His other notable works in the U.S. include the East Wing of the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., and the Mesa Laboratory of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado, among others. Pei also designed the former Creative Artists Agency building in Los Angeles and the Miami Tower, an office tower in downtown Miami.
Pei celebrated his 102nd birthday last month. Two of his sons are architects and run their own New York City-based firm, Pei Partnership Architects. [NYT] — Erin Hudson