Pei’s Cross-Cultural Foundations

I. M. Pei came of age during global upheaval and unrest. Economic depression and two massive wars—the Second Sino-Japanese War and the Second World War—influenced his life, values, and work. These events also enabled him to adapt to different environments and thrive as a China-born Chinese-American architect who transformed cities around the world.

Pei’s early architectural foundations developed from the cities he grew up in and the progressive Modern Movement in design that was spreading across the US during his studies. Through these experiences of reconciling multiple identities and formal influences, Pei adopted a transcultural approach that integrated the histories and conditions of a place with contemporary ideas and practices in architecture and society.

Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Suzhou

As a banker in Republican China, Pei’s father Tsuyee Pei played a significant role in the development of the country’s banking industry. His work with the Bank of China (BOC) relocated the family to metropolitan Hong Kong and later to Shanghai. Pei and his siblings attended missionary schools that emphasised both Chinese and Western teaching and philosophy.

Pei often visited his grandfather in Suzhou and came to see the city’s walled gardens as a counterpoint to Shanghai’s buzzing internationalism and urbanism. These places would have a profound impact on Pei’s understanding of how historical and cultural contexts shape space and identity.

Pei at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

Pei’s undergraduate education began at the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn), which had trained a generation of Chinese architects. However, he quickly realised that the school’s Beaux-Arts curriculum, which emphasised historical and monumental forms, did not meet his contemporary aspirations, so he transferred to MIT.

Initially, Pei wanted to focus on engineering at MIT. Sensing his promise as a designer, then Dean William Emerson persuaded him to do architectural design instead. He attended lectures by Swiss French architect Le Corbusier, whose teachings made a deep impression on him. Le Corbusier saw architecture in relation to economy, industry, and abstraction, and these ideas eventually influenced Pei’s undergraduate thesis.

Pei at Harvard University

Pei’s graduate training under Walter Gropius (1883–1969) at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design proved to be most formative. Gropius, the founder of Germany’s influential Bauhaus school, advanced a design philosophy that unified craft and industry. The minimal, rectangular forms of Bauhaus buildings, typically executed in glass, steel, and concrete, offered a stripped-down, modern architectural language supposedly free from any historical reference.

While Pei appreciated the Bauhaus approach to modern architecture, he sensed a limit in its ability to address varying cultures, climates, and histories. Ultimately, Pei’s graduate thesis, Museum of Chinese Art for Shanghai (1946), offered a critical response to Gropius’s philosophy, an effort highly commended by Gropius himself. Pei’s thesis work sparked the pair’s later collaboration on design for Huatung University in Shanghai.