Real Estate and Urban Redevelopment

While I. M. Pei earned his reputation from major cultural landmarks, his contributions to real estate and urban planning are lesser known, largely because of the architectural profession’s bias against commercial projects.

In 1948, Pei joined Webb & Knapp, the largest real estate development company in post-war United States (US). Many of his works in urban redevelopment, especially those in the US, focused on mixed-used planning, housing design, and regenerating underserved neighbourhoods.

Pei set up his own firm, I. M. Pei & Associates, in 1955, and subsequently worked on projects beyond American borders, where he and his team continued to exercise their knowledge of urban design, economics, and civic planning while navigating city leadership, regulations, and resource limitations. Despite the many challenges of large-scale and complex projects, Pei remained committed to each city’s potential for greater liveability.

Revitalising Cities and Communities

After the Second World War, mass migration to the suburbs left American downtowns in a state of decay. The US government declared urban renewal a national priority and offered huge subsidies to cities and developers to rebuild inner-city areas.

Developer William Zeckendorf (1905–1976), head of the firm Webb & Knapp, saw urban revitalisation as an ethical obligation. With the expertise of economists, designers, engineers, and city planners, he explored new forms of urban living through multi-use architectural projects, a vision he described as ‘beauty, functionalism, and economic soundness’. Attracted by this vision, Pei joined Webb & Knapp in 1948 as director of architectural research. The move made headlines and turned more than a few heads in the architectural field due to deep-seated prejudice against commercial real estate in the profession.

Much can be learned through the study of Pei’s projects. Whether built or unbuilt, these projects reveal Pei’s design process, giving us insight into his ideas and values in today’s context. For this exhibition, M+ produced five new models of Pei’s projects in collaboration with students from the Master of Architecture programme at the University of Hong Kong Department of Architecture (HKU) and The Chinese University of Hong Kong School of Architecture (CUHK). Each school has a different studio focus: designs for tall structures at HKU and designs for cultural production and display at CUHK.

Mile High Center (1952–1956) and Courthouse Square (1954–1960), Denver, Colorado

Located a block apart, the Mile High Center and the Courthouse Square were Webb & Knapp’s earliest mixed-use urban redevelopment projects. The sites were a close ensemble of interconnected spaces for offices and hotels, as well as retail, exhibition, and recreational use, creating a new focal point in downtown Denver. Pei convinced William Zeckendorf to reserve a large part of the site as open plazas for public use to attract tenants, appease opponents of the redevelopment, and ultimately raise the land’s value.

Southwest Washington Urban Redevelopment (1953–1959), Washington, D.C.

Washington, D.C.’s impoverished Southwest neighbourhood was Webb & Knapp’s first large-scale redevelopment project. Pei’s plan called for total clearance to populate the area with a walkable mix of housing and commercial amenities, bringing suburban ideals of community into an urban fabric. Southwest was racially, economically, and physically segregated from the rest of Washington. To connect the neighbourhood with the city’s core, Pei proposed to bridge a railroad track and expressway with a cultural mall called L’Enfant Plaza that provided access to the landmarks and museums at the National Mall. Unfortunately, bureaucracy and delays plagued the project, and L’Enfant Plaza was one of the few components that were realised.

Bedford-Stuyvesant Superblock (1966–1969), New York

To support the Civil Rights Movement, US Senator Robert F. Kennedy invited Pei to volunteer his service for the revitalisation of one of the country’s largest majority-Black neighbourhoods, Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn, New York. Pei’s team identified unused streets, which they felt lacked community focus, and proposed superblocks as a solution. Superblocks link parallel city blocks and create traffic-free zones, connected by interlocking landscaped paths, parks, and playgrounds. For this pilot project, Pei and landscape architect Paul Friedberg worked with the Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation, led by Franklin A. Thomas, who collaborated with the neighbourhood’s communities to redesign their public spaces.

Roosevelt Field Shopping Center (1951–1956), Garden City, New York

The Roosevelt Field Shopping Center in New York was the largest mall in the US when it opened in 1956. It was designed as a compact cluster of shopping blocks in a grid of streets surrounding an open-air plaza. This differed from the typical suburban mall of the time, which was an enclosed building spread over a large area. In an unbuilt scheme, a futuristic glass-and-steel canopy was also planned as a feature of the plaza. The mall was designed to accommodate more than a hundred shops and included indoor and outdoor recreational spaces and amenities like a skating rink and an art gallery.

Kips Bay Plaza (1957–1962), New York

In 1957, Pei began work on New York City’s Kips Bay Plaza, which was part of the city’s grand scheme to redevelop low-income neighbourhoods. Pei was intent on producing a development that was economically viable without sacrificing architectural innovation and the quality of life of its residents. Rather than symmetrical blocks of brick buildings, a typical design for public housing, Pei proposed two twenty-one-storey towers situated along the north and south borders of the site, which enclosed a private, three-acre park. The towers’ floor-to-ceiling windows, framed by exposed concrete slabs, maximised views of the Manhattan skyline. In the 1980s, the towers were converted to private condominiums as Kips Bay Plaza became a prized New York address.

Society Hill (1957–1964), Philadelphia

By the 1950s, Philadelphia’s historic Society Hill was in poor shape. Factory closures and job losses left the area economically depressed and its buildings in disrepair. Pei’s team proposed a unique solution to preserve existing red-brick row houses alongside new townhouses, creating a transition from the old to the new developments. Three new towers offered the required number of residential units and were purposefully placed along the Delaware River at a distance from existing buildings. Each tower is oriented to frame key historical landmarks in the neighbourhood and preserve views of them from different angles.

Going Global

Beginning in the 1960s, rapid economic growth and the rise of new business centres outside of the US presented opportunities for Pei’s firm to expand globally. They realised pioneering projects for the newly independent Singapore, which helped serve a postcolonial nation-building agenda, as well as in oil-rich Middle Eastern countries like Iran, keen to raise their international profile by establishing architectural landmarks.

These projects helped sustain Pei’s large office amid the American recession in the 1970s. They also demonstrated Pei’s ability to strategically adapt design and planning approaches he had used in the US to meet the aspirations of governments and corporations across multicultural contexts.

Kapsad Development (1975–1978; unbuilt), Tehran

Design for Tehran’s Industrial Credit Bank headquarters grew from a modest plan to a fourteen-hectare urban block. To meet Iran’s desire for large-scale developments that incorporated public buildings with modern housing, Pei devised a mix of low-, medium-, and high-rise towers that included apartments, office towers, a hotel, and a shopping centre. The land was divided into square parcels, with buildings arranged to echo the country’s historical walled courtyards. The project was abandoned at the beginning of the 1978–1979 Islamic Revolution.

Tête de la Défense (1970–1971; unbuilt), Paris

This little-known design for two tall towers at the French state-sponsored business district of La Défense marked Pei’s introduction to Paris, although the project was never realised. The design addressed many challenges of urban planning, such as public access and vehicular circulation. Situated at the end of a line of grand monuments, including the Louvre and Arc de Triomphe, the towers are linked by a curve near the base that preserves views of the historical axis of Paris.

Raffles International Centre Redevelopment (1969–1972), Singapore

In 1969, the newly independent city-state of Singapore invited Pei to envision the use of a thirteen-hectare area in its central business district. To maximise land value and make Singapore a destination, Pei proposed a ‘city within a city’ plan that integrated hotels, offices, shopping, residential facilities, a convention centre, and a park. Unfortunately, the global recession and a change in investors meant that only one superblock complex, Raffles City, was completed, in 1986.

Gateway (1981–1990), Singapore

With the twin blades of the Gateway skyscraper complex, Pei introduced a symbolic entryway and overall cohesion to Golden Mile, a mixed-use commercial area in Singapore. Its design was determined by its location, a prominent land parcel bounded by Beach Road, Nicoll Highway, and new traffic flyovers. The towers’ sharp angles, reflective cladding, and notched surfaces offer dynamic views of the buildings when seen from moving vehicles.

Oversea-Chinese Banking Corporation (OCBC) Centre (1970–1976), Singapore

Completed in 1976, the Oversea-Chinese Banking Corporation Centre was Pei’s first fully realised project in Singapore. Set back with an open-plan plaza, the slender tower with rounded ends faces a narrow street of shophouses. It marks a departure from the city’s existing towers, which covered all of their allocated site. With two freestanding cores spanned by steel trusses, the design eliminated the need for interior columns and met the government’s requirement for quick construction.

Marina South Development Plan (1982–1983; unbuilt), Singapore

Pei’s firm was one of the two companies invited to envision Singapore’s future central business district. A detailed model made by the firm, which covered areas beyond the proposed site, shows how Pei and his team considered the surrounding urban context in their proposal. Pei’s design aligned with the existing grid pattern of the city-state’s historical business area, creating a seamless merge between old and new districts. The rectilinear plan also allowed the area to look coherent at any stage during its development. Despite many changes, Pei’s proposal laid the groundwork for a plan that included a central green axis and a pair of focal points that look out onto the sea, key features that eventually shaped the civic identity of Marina Bay.

Sunning Plaza (1977–1982), Hong Kong

Pei’s first project in Hong Kong was Sunning Plaza, a combined office and residential development that replaced a 1950s apartment and hotel in Causeway Bay. Pei convinced the developer to set the tower’s entrance back from the street’s tree-lined edge, defying the conventional practice of maximising all usable land. With the generous frontage, Pei increased the project’s commercial value by adding street-level retail areas underneath the office and apartment towers.

Bank of China Tower (1982–1989), Hong Kong

Major thoroughfares, car parks, and multilevel flyovers surrounded the land earmarked for Hong Kong’s new Bank of China headquarters. Dissatisfied with how traffic enveloped the space, Pei negotiated with government officials. By exchanging a public area in one corner for another space, the site was reshaped into a parallelogram with the tower framed by triangular gardens. The new parameters placed the building in parallel with Central’s grid, aligning the headquarters with a road leading to Victoria Harbour with an unhindered view. The establishment of a new road also gave the tower a formal entrance accessible to cars and pedestrians.