In Chinese, Ieoh Ming means "to inscribe brightly." The name Ieoh Ming Pei's parents gave him proved prophetic. Over the past fifty years, I. M. Pei has designed more than fifty buildings around the world, ranging from industrial skyscrapers and important museums to low-income housing. Pei was born in 1917 in China but was raised in Hong Kong and Shanghai. In 1935 he moved to the United States to study architecture and engineering at the University of Pennsylvania but quickly transferred to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and later to Harvard University. Like Sullivan, Wright and Van der Rohe, Pei didn't want to copy the old classical or the Beaux-Arts styles, but wanted to create something modern. In the library at M. I. T. Pei found three books by the Swiss-French architect Charles-Edouard Jeanneret-Gris, better known as Le Corbusier. Pei was inspired by the innovative designs of the new International style, characterized by simplified form and the use of glass and steel materials. Le Corbusier visited MIT in November 1935, an occasion which powerfully affected Pei: "The two days with Le Corbusier, or 'Corbu' as we used to call him, were probably the most important days in my architectural education." Pei was also influenced by the work of US architect Frank Lloyd Wright. In 1938 he drove to Spring Green, Wisconsin to visit Wright's famous Taliesin building. After waiting for two hours, however, he left without meeting Wright. Due to his reliance on abstract form and materials such as stone, concrete, glass, and steel, Pei has been considered a disciple of Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer, both of whom he studied with at Harvard. However, Pei's work does not suggest his primary concern is theory. He does not believe that architecture must find forms to express the times or that it should remain isolated from commercial forces. Pei's pyramid design for the Louvre museum in Paris in 1989 which he is most known for, was not immediately popular. Maybe 90% of Parisians were opposed to it at the beginning, although now almost everyone loves it, and in fact, it is considered one of the landmarks of Paris like the Eiffel Tower.
This collection of fabrics is from our Transition 2010 issue of Vogue Fabrics By Mail, a color coordinated catalog of fashion fabric swatches for wardrobe building.
This collection of fabrics is from our Transition 2010 issue of Vogue Fabrics By Mail, a color coordinated catalog of fashion fabric swatches for wardrobe building.
