Life Is Architecture: A Curator's Perspective on Rethinking I. M. Pei

Q. What was the curatorial vision behind I. M. Pei: Life Is Architecture, and how does the exhibition present architecture as central to Pei’s life and thinking?

Shirley Surya: Since this is the first ever major retrospective of Mr. Pei, the goal was to present Pei like you’ve never seen him before. Behind this seemingly simple pitch is the realisation that Pei is famous but understudied. It was thus important for us to contextualise his practice through the lens of ‘Life’—firstly in terms of his own life’s background and personal motivations, and secondly the social, cultural, economic and political forces that shaped his architectural and planning projects.

We wanted to further expand on what the public popularly assumes of his work and salient characteristics like technical finesse, geometry, or east–west dialogue, as more than formal exercises or cultural nostalgia, but built upon deeper convictions. For example, Pei’s interest in deriving design principles from the Chinese garden for projects rooted in the geography of China stemmed from his belief in pluralising or diversifying modern architecture, which he had developed as a student in the 1940s, much earlier before the discourse of regionalism or postmodernism.

Architecture is undoubtedly the main subject and focus of his practice, but what underpinned his design approach were his values as a humanist, his belief in the craft of architecture as much as architecture’s need for a productive relationship with the city and its people, and his inquisitive and collaborative spirit with the client and his design team in manifesting the projects. We wanted to tell the story of an architect or architecture through its inextricable links with these aspects of value-system and societal forces.

Q. How did you structure the exhibition into six thematic sections, and what do these reveal about the evolution of Pei’s career?

Surya: One could choose to understand Pei’s life and practice through many other thematic lenses, but we chose these six themes to primarily highlight the design motivations and strategies that consistently characterised his practice across a longer historical period.

It was not just about presenting an 'evolution’ of his career, but about tracing these strategies across periods and places, so that our understanding of Pei is not tied to just a particular project, while also highlighting the shifts that occur even within a single theme.

For example, in the Material and Structural Innovation section, we showed how his team moved from mastering architectural concrete to developing complex glass and steel tensegrity structures. In Reinterpreting History Through Design, we showed his diverse reinterpretation of the Chinese garden typology across various projects, from a direct engagement with the natural environment to developing an abstract geometry that reflects the garden’s spatiality.

Another rationale for these six sections was also to reveal under-represented aspects of his practice. For example, Real Estate and Urban Redevelopment highlights the early yet significant phase of his career as one heading the design team of a real estate developer to show how his grasp of land use, negotiation with policy makers, and concepts of urban regeneration deeply influenced his design practice, such that his buildings were designed as part of a larger urban organism.

Q. What is the importance of including newly commissioned photographs and models of Pei’s work in this exhibition?

Surya: As a curatorial strategy, producing the architectural models of Pei’s work was crucial as Pei Cobb Freed & Partners—from whom most of the archival materials in the exhibition were sourced—only had a few architectural models left. For the public who never visited his buildings, models provide the most tangible means of understanding the spatial sequence, materiality, and form of the architect’s work.

We therefore commissioned the production of five models with the faculty and students at Hong Kong’s two main architecture schools, and three models with model makers and our design team. The collaboration with the architecture schools was particularly productive, especially for unbuilt projects like his undergraduate and graduate thesis projects, ‘Standardised Propaganda Units for War Time and Peace Time in China’ (MIT) and ‘Museum of Chinese Art for Shanghai’ (Harvard GSD). The students translated Pei’s rudimentary drawings into 3D digital models for professional fabrication, engaging with his lesser-known works, and contributing to exhibition design decisions on scale and materiality with the M+ team to ensure the projects could be experienced effectively by visitors.

In terms of the newly commissioned photographs, we decided on these earlier when we conceived the exhibition’s publication. While Pei’s buildings have been widely documented by famous photographers like Ezra Stoller, we thought it was crucial to capture the buildings in their current context, to demonstrate how they are used and how they’ve aged over time. We also commissioned photographs of earlier projects by Pei that are not easily accessible like the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) building in Boulder, Colorado and the Tunghai University campus in Taichung. We wanted photographers from a more diverse geographical and disciplinary context to capture Pei’s work through their own lens, including artists South Ho and Yoneda Tomoko, and Dubai-based documentary photographer Mohamed Somji. In the end, these newly commissioned photographs also enabled us to present them as large-scale graphic reproduction that became the exhibition’s visual-spatial markers.

Q. How does the exhibition address the social, political, and urban contexts in which Pei worked, including moments of public debate or controversy?

Surya: These contextual forces were revealed in how we present Pei’s projects, particularly in the Real Estate and Urban Redevelopment section of the exhibition. We conceived a pyramidal framing structure to present the documentation of the Grand Louvre project. Its central presence in the exhibition space at M+ and Qatar Museums Gallery – Al Riwaq is meant to highlight the project as a prime example of how he persevered through an unprecedented state commission, but also the arduous opposition and controversy the project faced. We purposely reproduced a series of articles to recall the mockery the public made of his proposed design of the pyramid and the subterranean integration of retail and public transit with the museum. We also reproduced a large photo of his victorious gesture before the 1:1 mock-up of the pyramid after having won over the public with it.

Episodes of misalignment of vision with the client could also be seen in how we presented Pei’s prestigious and pioneering commissions like the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum (1964–1979) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the Fragrant Hill Hotel (1979–1982) in Beijing. These were important to include in the exhibition to show how the value of an architectural project lies not only just in its outcome, but also in the architect’s attempt in making the best of a situation with constraints as well as a project’s impact on architectural and cultural discourse.

Q. Pei was also well known for his material and structural innovations. How are these aspects explored across the galleries?

Surya: These aspects are certainly clear in the Material and Structural Innovation section. As previously said, we chose to divide this section into two: Pei’s early experimentation with architectural concrete and stone which we felt was a lesser-known aspect of his career; followed by a shift toward building with glass and steel which the general public was more familiar with, especially through iconic buildings like the Grand Louvre pyramid and the Bank of China Tower in Hong Kong.

For the concrete section, we had to produce various types of concrete samples—from standard roadside concrete pavements to fair-faced concrete block to the likes of the bush-hammered concrete blocks Pei used for projects like NCAR and Everson Museum for visitors to not only touch but to also see how his team had transformed an industrial material like concrete by mixing it with selected stone aggregates from certain quarries to obtain an earthy colour that melded with the building’s surrounding environment and whose texture reveals the shimmering mica when light hits its surface. We also wanted to highlight that his material and structural breakthroughs in nearly every project were not only driven by his ambition for the uniqueness of each design, but also by his care for the craft of architecture—such that with every innovation, the construction industry gained a new product or construction technique. This is evident in the case of how French glass manufacturer Saint-Gobain’s production of crystal-clear glass for the Louvre pyramid led to its wider use in large-scale construction.

Q. How does the exhibition connect Pei’s global practice to Doha and the region, beyond his work on the Museum of Islamic Art (MIA)? 

Surya: Pei’s search for a regional and national expression in architecture—as expressed in his letter to his classmate at Harvard Graduate School of Design in the 1940s and in his quote, “I don’t think I shall feel strange in a strange land,” from a letter to his father as an undergraduate at MIT are my proposition in demonstrating how his life and work directly inform not just his design for the Museum of Islamic Art (MIA), but his engagements with cultures as diverse as those of the region.

Before MIA, there was one unbuilt project in Tehran: the Kapsad Development (1975–1978), which already indicated his sensitivity to deriving formal and spatial principles of traditional or regional archetype. This is evident in how the mixed-use scheme of multi-tiered towers are arranged into square parcels with reference to Iran’s historic walled courtyards.

It is really the aspiration and spirit found in his quotes that I find relevant not only in how we understand Pei’s global practice, but also how we are to approach designing for culturally diverse contexts. He sought a ‘regional’ or ‘national’ character not because of trends or political correctness, but from a belief that humans are diverse in their traditions and ways of living, and that modern architecture ought to break through a singular mould to reflect these pluralities.

He knew that he was different—a ‘stranger’ to the land of America—yet he chose to not ‘feel strange in a strange land’ by embracing all its differences while remaining clear of his own ‘difference’. Such a spirit of embracing differences without homogenising them is a rare spirit of being ‘rooted’ at the same time humbly open to a dialogue with others.

Q. What do you hope visitors—particularly those without an architectural background—will take away from the exhibition?

Surya: As a curator focusing on architecture, the profession and the discipline of architecture continue to intrigue me. Yet its value only lies in its relevance and interconnectedness with people, cities, and humanity.

As expressed in the exhibition’s title and Pei’s quote—“Life is architecture, and architecture is the mirror of life”—I hope the visitors of this exhibition take away architecture’s inextricable links to life, what Pei described as the ‘functional currents swirling around’ the act of designing and building.

We should not take architecture’s manifestation for granted, and as architects, clients, and even members of the public, we have a part in shaping these ‘currents’ and values that help cities and communities thrive.

Shirley Surya is the Co-Curator of Design and Architecture at M+, Hong Kong.