IM Pei, Hong Kong review — much more than just the Louvre Pyramid
在香港M+博物馆里遇见贝聿铭

IM Pei, the Chinese-American architect who died in 2019 at the age of 102, seems a perfect choice for the inaugural architecture exhibition in Hong Kong’s vast M+ museum. His towering Bank of China tower is visible over the water; like Hong Kong itself, his career straddled east and west, finance and art, commerce and culture. From his striking addition to the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC (1978) to his serene Museum of Islamic Art in Doha (2008), not to mention the controversial glass pyramid at the Louvre, you could call him the world’s first starchitect.

Yet this huge show, one of the largest devoted to an architect anywhere in years, does not entirely endorse this narrative. Instead it suggests that Pei was a member of a team, not solely responsible for his buildings but a figure who guided from the background. This is, of course, how architecture is mostly made — even if it is not the narrative we are used to.

It is notable that there are no drawings in Pei’s hand here later than his student years; no napkin sketches, presentation drawings, conceptual diagrams — nothing. If it weren’t for occasional video footage of him playing on screens, he would be almost entirely absent. Yet it is arguably this quality that makes him such a fascinating, enigmatic figure.

Instead, this is an exhibition about production, the work of an office. There are technical drawings alongside perspectives made for presentation, drawings for building as well as presenting. The sketches here (by other architects in the office) are not of the romantic lone genius kind (so often made after the event to make the process look creative) but rather scruffy scrawls, drawing as a way of working through a problem.

Ieoh Ming Pei was born in Canton (Guangzhou) in 1917, the scion of a wealthy family, descendants of the Ming dynasty. He went to study architecture in the US, where he was taught by Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius and became friends with another Bauhaus émigré, Marcel Breuer.

But his start came as a result of his relationship with the cigar-chomping real estate developer William Zeckendorf and his firm Webb & Knapp. In 1948, Pei leapt straight into the cut-throat world of commercial development, developing a reputation as a sensible, reliable, sometimes pliable architect, acceptable to corporate America. Even as a much older man, he maintained the well-tailored appearance of mid-century Midtown; woollen suits (whatever the weather), tie, French cuffs and the round, horn-rimmed glasses which recalled one of his idols Le Corbusier and made him look a little like Mole from The Wind in the Willows. One pair of glasses occupies its own vitrine here.

Together with Webb & Knapp, he built across the US, from Texas to Washington DC, some notable and some forgettable structures resulting. Pei got his break on his own with the enigmatic National Centre for Atmospheric Research outside Boulder, Colorado (1961-67). A complex piece of Brutalism set against the sublime backdrop of the Rockies, this was a building which blended the grandeur of antiquity and the drama of topography with a strong composition of light and shadow.

It led to his commission in 1964 to design the John F Kennedy Library in Dorchester, Boston. Jacqueline Kennedy had been charmed by Pei but the project was fraught with difficulty (changes of site after political objections, construction problems and progressive reductions in size); it was not completed for 15 years. Pei freely admitted its imperfections, yet it was this building that announced him to the world and set in place a style that became distinctive: triangular atriums, glass walls on a high-tech steel structure, soaring internal space and prow-like angles. Wandering around the show, the recurrence of these forms becomes clear, almost a little ridiculous, the motifs appearing and reappearing in every building and at every scale whether seemingly suitable or not.

The two projects that made Pei a household name (inasmuch as architects ever become household names) were the National Gallery of Art’s East Building (1968-78) in Washington, DC, and the Louvre Pyramid. Both were fraught interventions in much-loved classical buildings, both mostly vindicated. Their geometry, the scale of their public spaces and their democratic generosity awed a public which had become bored with the banality of late Modernism.

The line drawings aren’t especially revealing, but the renderings, by professional illustrators including the excellent Helmut Jacoby, J Henderson Barr and Paul Stevenson Oles, are for me the best things in the show. The office’s architectural drawings give little away — nothing of the massing or the space — so the illustrations were critical because Pei’s architecture was difficult to describe.

He was sparing with colour, an exemplar of the white and grey which characterised late Modernism. Look over the water from the museum terrace towards the Bank of China Building with its triangular grid and spiked crown and there too you find an architecture drained of colour, the glass appearing black, the structure white, the base granite grey. Bank employees have stuffed the public spaces with plastic flowers and trees. Twinkling ice-blue LEDs subsequently added to the outside allow it to meld into Hong Kong’s skyline, a final insult.

The corporate monumentality of Pei’s architecture is revealed in clips from movies including Woody Allen’s Sleeper and Paul Verhoeven’s RoboCop, shot in the National Centre for Atmospheric Research and around Dallas City Hall respectively. But his late work softened some of that steely smoothness. Pei often said (including in a 2010 interview with the FT) that he was a western architect, but that the Chinese in him had somehow survived.

In the last decade of his life, he acknowledged Asian and historic precedents more directly. In his Western New pavilion for the Suzhou Museum in China (2006) and in the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha (2008) he referred to historic forms and drew on memories of his childhood in a Suzhou summer house and its traditional garden. The show’s curators suggest that this garden was an ever-present motif for Pei’s conception of architecture: cool, controlled yet capable of delivering a surprise around each corner.

Pei himself was loath to grant permission for an exhibition in his lifetime; this is the first, five years after his death. If the architect has not accrued quite the same prestige or cult status as rivals such as Mies van der Rohe, Oscar Niemeyer or Louis Kahn, it is perhaps partly because he lacked a body of theory. As well as there being limited drawings, there are only a smattering of letters, interviews and brief explanatory texts on display here. For him the building should stand on its own, without a barrage of justification or spurious theoretical underpinning.

That slight absence of reflection makes it doubly striking to encounter a short film of him in the very last room, sitting in his impeccable suit beneath a big tree being asked how he feels about his buildings. He grins perhaps a little too broadly and replies, with an anxious laugh, “Mixed feelings”.