When I. M. Pei died at the age of 102 in 2019, he was among the most famous architects on the planet, his works including the pyramidal entry to the Louvre in Paris and the East Building of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. His footprint in Dallas is especially notable with the tilted-front City Hall and the Meyerson Symphony Center, not to mention a trio of skyscrapers designed by his partner, Harry Cobb.
And yet, for all his success, Pei has remained something of an understudied figure, with the commercial origins of his practice and the formalist aesthetics of his design work perennially falling out of critical and academic favor.
A new exhibition at the M+ museum in Hong Kong (running now through Jan. 4, 2025) and an accompanying monograph, I. M. Pei: Life Is Architecture (coming in September from Thames & Hudson, $85), aim to take up Pei’s career with the kind of thoughtful rigor it warrants. The book, edited by curators Shirley Surya and Aric Chen, includes essays by leading architectural historians including Barry Bergdoll, Eric Mumford, and Joan Ockman exploring Pei’s urban design work (a particularly underexamined subject), his structural and material innovation, his relations with powerful patrons and his civic works. Dallas City Hall is covered in some detail, as well it should be.
