Ieoh Ming Pei, one of the last great modernist architects, has died aged 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.
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. His glass pyramid outside the Louvre, completed in 1989, is now one of Paris' most famous landmarks.
Pei was born in China in 1917 into a wealthy family. His father was a banker. His artistic mother—a calligrapher and musician—had the greater influence on him. Despite not speaking English, he moved to the US at the age of 18 to study at Pennsylvania, MIT and Harvard. He worked as a research scientist for the US government during World War Two, and went on to work as an architect, founding his own firm in 1955. He carried on working well into old age, creating one of his most famous masterpieces—the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha, Qatar—in his 80s.
He has designed buildings, hotels, schools and other structures across North America, Asia and Europe. His other work includes Dallas City Hall and Japan's Miho Museum. His style was influenced by his love of Islamic architecture. His favoured building materials were glass and steel, with a combination of concrete.
He won a variety of awards and prizes for his buildings, including the AIA Gold Medal, the Praemium Imperiale for Architecture. In 1983 Pei was given the fifth Pritzker Architecture Prize for giving the 20th century some of its most beautiful interior spaces and exterior forms. He used his $100,000 prize money to start a scholarship fund for Chinese students to study architecture in America. In person, Pei was always neatly dressed, good-tempered, charming and unusually modest.
