(Photo Credit: AP Photo/Pierre Gleizes,/File)
Remebering The Creator Of The Louvre Pyramid
I.M. Pei, one of the last great modernist architects, has died, Pei Cobb Freed & Partners confirmed. He was 102 years old.
Although he worked mostly in the United States, one of Pei’s most memorable European projects was his redevelopment of the Louvre Museum in Paris in the 1980s. The Louvre, the glass and metal pyramid that famously sits in Paris, France, is a famous tourist destination as well as a famous landmark for the country.
Pei was the first foreign architect to work on the Louvre in its long history, and his designs were initially opposed. But eventually Pei’s work won the French over, and upon its opening in 1989, the New York Times the pyramid “a technological tour de force: it is exquisitely detailed, light and nearly transparent.”
Born in China in 1917, Pei was born into an affluent family, and despite not speaking English, Pei pursued an education in the United States, traveling by boat from China to San Francisco in 1935. He studied architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard, and eventually set up his own architectural practice in New York in 1955.
Pei won the commission to design the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library & Museum in 1964, which helped established his name in the architecture world. He eventually went on to become a global sensation for his work evolutionary and innovative work.
By: Maytinee Kramer
