Among the depressingly small number of practicing architects whose work is likely to outlive the fads—Postmodernism, Deconstructivism—that have plagued the profession over the last fifteen years, the name of I. M. Pei must figure prominently. Born to an eminent family in China in 1917, Ieoh Ming Pei came to this country in the Thirties. His architectural education took place primarily at M.I.T. and Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, where he studied with Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer, and for five decades he has been unswervingly committed to the rigorous tradition of High Modernism that they helped to propagate. The John Hancock Tower (1966-1976) in Boston, the East Building of the National Gallery (1968-1978) in Washington, D .C., the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center (1979-1986) in New York, the seventy-one-foot-tall glass pyramid and supporting structures at the Louvre (1983-1989) in Paris: these and other signature buildings designed by Pei and his firm have established him as one of the most distinguished architects of his generation.
In this first full-length study of the architect, Carter Wiseman, architectural critic for New York magazine and editor of The Yale Alumni Magazine, has given us a sympathetic but admirably clear-eyed overview of Pei’s career. In his early chapters, Mr. Wiseman occasionally indulges in what I think of as coffee-table-book prose. There is a good bit about Pei “dressed in a faded pink polo shirt, khakis, and Tretorn tennis shoes” and the like. But once he gets down to the architecture, Mr. Wiseman is all business. Beginning with Pei’s work in the late Forties for the New York developer William Zeckendorf, he concentrates on a handful of the architect’s most ambitious and well-known projects, discussing the evolution and reception of each in detail.
His work “is fundamentally about the creative refinement of what has gone before.”
Mr. Wiseman may be right that “Pei has emerged as the most durably creative of American architects working at the grand scale.” There can be no doubt that he is a contender for that title. Yet Pei’s contribution is primarily one of application, not innovation. Pei is not a form-giver in the tradition of a Mies or a Louis Kahn. As Mr. Wiseman observes, his work “is fundamentally about the creative refinement of what has gone before.” While the best of Pei’s buildings have an austere sculptural beauty that borders on the lyrical, a hardheaded pragmatism may well be the trademark of his architectural achievement. Something like pragmatism, at any rate, certainly has helped earn him the enormous corporate success he has enjoyed. As Mr. Wiseman notes, in an era when many architects “have built entire reputations on the skill with which they can discuss their work in polysyllabic abstractions, Pei is remarkably grounded in results. What a colleague once called an ‘aedicular indication of a room,’ Pei would more likely describe as a window.” Perhaps it is the combination of lyricism and pragmatism that led another colleague to describe Pei as possessing a “golden tongue and titanium spine.”
Though Mr. Wiseman’s account of Pei’s work is everywhere respectful, it is never sycophantic. Even about the works he most admires—Pei’s hugely ambitious project for the Louvre, for example—he is refreshingly forthright about shortcomings. It is a measure of Mr. Wiseman’s seriousness as a critic that one can admire his accomplishment while still disagreeing with many of his particular judgments. Can it really be said, for example, the reflective glass of the sixty-story John Hancock Tower successfuly “served to dematerialize” the tower’s bulk? Having recently been in Boston for a few days, I had occasion to walk by Copley Square, directly off which the building stands, a number of times. Nestled between H. H. Richardson’s Trinity Church and Blackall and Hardenbergh’s staid Copley Plaza Hotel, that seven-hundred-and-ninety-foot polyhedron may be said to soar; it may be said to loom, to tower, to dominate; no amount of mirror tricks can make it seem “dematerialized.”