Blog - American Revolutionaries: I.M. Pei vs. Frank Lloyd Wright and Other Architects

2008-07-15 22:00:07

While I considered to do a chart of the all the differences between these famous architects, I was easily distracted by Google images of their amazing works. Luckily there is a good review of a biography on I.M. Pei that actually starts by pointing out their differences:
Taken from I.M. Pei: Mandarin of Modernism the review in the magazine Insight on the News By Eric Gibson On the face of it, I.M. Pei seems an unlikely candidate for a biography. He is not, as was Frank Lloyd Wright, a flamboyant personality or controversial architect. With the exception of a near brush with bankruptcy in the 1970s and the extended drama of the Louvre project in the 1980s, Pei's career has been almost serene in its easy ascent to, and untroubled existence in, the architectural stratosphere. Nor does Pei have skeletons in his closet -- nothing like Philip Johnson's extended flirtation with Nazism, thoroughly documented in Franz Schultze's biography of the architect a year ago. Finally, for all his prominence and skill, Pei is not an innovator in the manner of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the pioneer of architectura modernism and the inventor called "glass box." Pei is nonetheless an interesting figure: Just how did he manage to become the architect of the establishment, surviving public hostility to the clean lines and simplified geometry of modernism? And how did he emerge unscathed from debacles such as the popping windows in his Hancock tower in Boston? These questions and more are answered in I.M. Pei: Mandarin of Modernism (Carol Southern Books/crown, 364 pp), Michael Cannell's elegant biography. Although the author covers familiar ground, his focus is on the man rather than the buildings, revealing the overall fabric of a life. Pei was born in Canton, China, in 1917, the second child and first son of a prosperous banker. From the beginning, his life was defined by oppositions: the atmosphere of domestic comfort set against a backdrop of civil and world war; immersion in traditional Chinese culture and the competition it faced from Western mores; an abiding love for his native country (which he left in 1935) and an open acknowledgment that only in America could he achieve personal and professional success (he became a U.S. citizen in 1955). The sight of a skyscraper under construction seems to have inspired Pei to study architecture. He enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania but transferred to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology after two weeks, bored by Penn's strict adherence to the canons of beaux-arts at a time of modernist ferment. After MIT, he studied at Harvard under Walter Gropius, from whom he imbibed the virtues of geometric purity in architecture, and then accepted a professorship at the university. Although only in his 30s, Pei already was recognized as an exceptional architect -- one who had mastered the modernist language of utopian purity yet managed to incorporate into his work factors such as indigenous traditions and the character of the site. Then Pei made a surprising move. In those days, architects (particularly modernist apostles) were expected to labor in obscurity (and poverty), refusing to compromise their aesthetic principles until the scales dropped from the eyes of the Philistine public. Possibly because Pei had a family to support, he had other things in mind, signing up as house architect for New York real-estate developer William Zeckendorf just as the urban-renewal boom of the 1950s was getting under way. Zeckendorf was a wheeling-and-dealing visionary, and he and Pei shared a belief in bringing quality architecture to urban housing. By and large they succeeded. A small technical innovation involving concrete in the Kips Bay housing project in New York City, for example, allowed Pei to produce middle-income apartments with more light and space than anything produced previously at only a fractionally higher cost. In the end, the two men did more to transform the face of this country than almost anyone else. Pei left Zeckendorf in the late 1950s, just as the dreams of urban renewal were turning sour and Zeckendorf's fortunes were plummeting (the developer died, bankrupt, in 1976). But with his selection as architect of the Boston's Kennedy Library in 1964, Pei's career really took off, paving the way for later successes such as the East Building of the National Gallery of Art in Washington and the Louvre project in Paris. This also was the point at which Pei became, as Johnson put it, a "diplomat." Much of Pei's success is associated with his ability to get things done. The caricature of the architect arrogantly demanding that clients and zoning board bow before his enlightened wishes -- of which Wright is the paradigm -- does not apply to Pei. Upbringing, cultural background and what Cannell calls "a sonarlike sensitivity to the nuances of power" made him highly adept at wooing potential allies and converting opponents. Still, as good as this book is, one thing remains elusive. Pei's formative years were turbulent ones that culminated in permanent exile. Yet none of this is reflected in Pei himself, who is an extraordinarily courtly person and, significantly, a highly reticent one as well. Nor is there any sign of turmoil in his ordered, Olympian architecture.

Related Links:
Ovation TV rograms-
I.M. Pei: First Person Singular Frank Lloyd Wright: Murder, Myth and Modernism
A Daily Dose of Architecture (blog)

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