阅读下列短文,从每题所给的A、B、C和D四个选项中,选出最佳选项。
I.M. Pei, the Chinese-American, who was regarded as one of the last great modernist architects, has died at the age of 102.
Although he worked mostly in the United States, Pei will always be remembered for a European project: His redevelopment of the Louvre Museum in Paris in the 1980s. He gave us the glass and metal pyramid in the main courtyard, along with three smaller pyramids and a vast subterranean (地下的) addition to the museum entrance.
Pei was the first foreign architect to work on the Louvre in its long history, and initially his designs were fiercely opposed. But in the end, the French—and everyone else—were won over. Winning the fifth Pritzker Architecture Prize in 1983, he was thought as giving the 20th century "some of its most beautiful inside spaces and outside forms …His talent and skill in the use of materials approach the level of poetry."
After studying architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard, Pei set up his own architectural practice in New York in 1955.
Designing the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library & Museum in 1964 established him as a name. His East Building of the National Gallery of Art in Washington in 1978 changed people's ideas of a museum. The site was an odd trapezoid (梯形) shape. Pei's solution was to cut it in two. The resulting building was dramatic, light and elegant—one of the first crowd-pleasing cathedrals of modern art.
Though known as a modernist, and notable for his forms based on arrangements of simple geometric (几何的) shapes, he once urged Chinese architects to look more to their architectural tradition rather than designing in a western style.
In person, I.M. Pei was good-humored, charming and unusually modest. His working process was evolutionary, but innovation (创新) was never an intended goal.
"Stylistic originality is not my purpose," he said. "I want to find the originality in the time, the place and the problem."