I. M. PEI 081


not want to limit himself by working for someone else and so in 1955 I. M. Pei & Associates was informally established, becoming completely independent from Webb & Knapp in 1960. Te new firm secured numerous important commissions, including the National Centre for Atmospheric Research (1961–1967) in Boulder, Colorado, the Everson Museum of Art (1961–1968) in Syracuse, New York, and the Cleo Rogers Memorial Library in Columbus, Indiana, (1963–1969). However, the commission that saw Pei thrown well and truly into the spotlight was the prestigious John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Dorchester, Massachusetts, a building that took 15 years to complete.


In 1964, the year after President Kennedy was assassinated, Jacqueline Kennedy selected Pei over Louis Kahn, Philip Johnson,


Gordon Bunshaft and Paul Rudolph to design the library dedicated to her late husband. Even though he was still relatively unknown, Pei seemed to her to be filled with promise and, despite his inexperience of monumental projects, she believed he had the imagination to realise her vision. However, political objections to the library’s proposed site in Cambridge delayed the building for years until a new site was found adjacent to the Harbour Campus of the University of Massachusetts Boston. Embracing the challenge with characteristic gusto, Pei conceived a design that married classical elegance with modernist innovation. Te centrepiece of the bold, white geometric complex is a soaring glass pavilion serving as a beacon of hope and inspiration, its transparent walls embodying the optimism and promise of the Kennedy era. Te library


was officially dedicated on 20 October 1979, but for Pei its opening was bittersweet, since to his mind it represented a compromise of his original intentions.


Pei believed strongly that modernism could produce structures with just as much dignity, durability and popular appeal as the greatest of traditional buildings. He demonstrated this with aplomb when his elegant and innovative solution for the East Building of the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. was unveiled in 1978. Commissioned by the gallery’s trustees to design a new building to provide additional space for the permanent collection and temporary exhibitions, Pei faced the challenge of fitting the new structure into a trapezoidal-shaped plot of land while harmonising it with John Russell Pope’s neoclassical West Building, completed in


Growing up in China during a time of political upheaval, he witnessed first-hand the clash between tradition and modernity that would later define much of his ethos


Left J. Henderson Barr rendering of the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art (1968–1973) viewed from the Arts Quad, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York


Top right I. M. Pei outside John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Dorchester, Massachusetts


Right I. M. Pei explaining his proposal for Oklahoma City’s new downtown to one of the ‘city fathers’


LEFT: THE OKLAHOMAN – USA TODAY NETWORK TOP: TED DULLY/THE BOSTON GLOBE VIA GETTY IMAGES


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