I.M. Pei

I. M. Pei (1917-2019) was a Chinese-American architect, born in Guangzhou and raised in Hong Kong and Shanghai. He moved to the United States in 1935, earned an architecture degree from MIT in 1940 and a master's from Harvard's Graduate School of Design in 1946, where Walter Gropius taught. He worked for the developer William Zeckendorf from 1948, founded I. M. Pei & Associates in 1955 and received the Pritzker Prize in 1983.

His buildings use simple geometric volumes, often triangles and prisms, in concrete, stone and glass. The Mesa Laboratory of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado (1967), has concrete towers mixed with local stone to match the color of the nearby mountains. The East Building of the National Gallery of Art in Washington (1978) divides its trapezoidal site into two triangles around a skylit atrium. He also designed the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston (1979).

French president François Mitterrand chose him to redesign the Louvre in Paris. The glass and steel pyramid in the Napoleon Courtyard, opened in 1989, is the museum's main entrance and lights a new underground lobby. The Bank of China Tower in Hong Kong (1990) is braced by a triangular frame that shows on its facade. His later works include the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha, Qatar (2008).