The 92 year old Chinese-born American architect I. M. Pei received one of the world’s most prestigious prizes for architecture, the Royal Gold Medal, at a glittering ceremony at the RIBA. I. M. Pei is best known for buildings including the pyramids at the Louvre in Paris and the East Wing of the National Gallery Washington DC.

Previous winners include Sir Edwin Lutyens, Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Oscar Neiemeyer, Norman Foster and Richard Rogers.
 
I. M. Pei is simply a profoundly complete architect who defies categorisation. His career has been an extraordinary gift to architecture. ‘To be a good architect,’ he has said, ‘There is something about pushing the limit……I would like to think I push myself to the limit.’

Ieoh Ming Pei (always known as I. M.) is a Chinese American architect, born in Canton, China in 1917. He travelled to the United States in 1935 to study architecture, and never returned to live in his home country.

He received a Masters degree from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where he studied under Gropius and Breuer and alongside Philip Johnson, a mature student. Here he came under the influence of the International Style which was to inspire his work for the next 70 years. One of his projects at Harvard was for a new museum in Shanghai in which he tested the boundaries of modernism and which was much praised by Gropius.

His MIT thesis was called Propaganda Units in China, a series of pre-fabricated units of bamboo with panels painted different colours to indicate usage: dance, performance, lecture, film.

I. M. Pei began his architectural practice in the early 1950s and has produced challenging and thoughtful architecture in every decade, which has come to be a part of the definition of its time. His first commissions were for the noted planner-developer William Zeckendorf.

The Miesian Mile High Center in Denver (1952-56), a 22 storey tower, was way ahead of its time and demonstrated Pei’s mature belief that you don’t need a lot of money to do good architecture, just a lot of thought. But the developer was not merely interested in commercial architecture.

With Pei as his architect he would fly from city to city persuading mayors to apply for federal funding for slum clearance and urban renewal – ‘healing the wounds of the city’ in Pei’s telling phrase.

The low budgets for early radical housing and urbanism projects such as Kips Bay in New York City forced him to experiment with materials. This was architecture of the minimum. Brick was too expensive, so Pei argued for in-situ concrete – the façade was the structure. Kips Bay also gave him his first experience of masterplanning, a subject still dear to his heart.

Kip’s Bay still stands today with Pei’s name on a plaque. It is a fine early achievement, a social project that has paid its way in the commercial world and one he is still immensely proud of.

I. M. Pei’s architecture has always asked searching questions and provided invaluable answers as to how contemporary architecture can engage the complex issues of our times.