[rip] I.M. Pei

[bikeridah]

https://www.usnews.com/news/us/articles/2019-05-16/im-pei-architect-who-designed-louvre-pyramid-dies-at-102

[AngryScientist]

wow, 102! that's a good run!

[monkeybanana86]

RIP and I can't believe he did a beautiful museum at age 91!

[weisan]

Bike pal, thanks for the news and the link.

"At one level my goal is simply to give people pleasure in being in a space and walking around it," he said. "But I also think architecture can reach a level where it influences people to want to do something more with their lives. That is the challenge that I find most interesting."

[fogrider]

Another legend has left us, RIP.

[Duende]

^ no kidding. Few will ever achieve what he did. Truly a great one.

[zmalwo]

^ no kidding. Few will ever achieve what he did. Truly a great one.

Maybe they are just still in development stage, social or technical. :)

[572cv]

Bike pal, thanks for the news and the link.

A person who thought long term about the greater societal impacts of his work. Respect.

[fignon's barber]

I.M. Pei is actually my wife's grandfather's cousin. This morning she was telling me stories about the family.

[MattTuck]

I went to Cornell undergrad, and took an "intro to architecture" course (the type of class that isn't really for architecture majors).

One of the topics was the I.M. Pei designed Johnson Art Museum on campus. At first blush, it is a disjointed concrete monstrosity.

https://images.adsttc.com/media/images/5038/0794/28ba/0d59/9b00/0a04/newsletter/stringio.jpg?1414197905

But the professor shared how Pei walked around the campus, especially the arts quad, and began to understand the bigger environment. The arts quad is a series of substance/void/substance/void... with the buildings blocking the view, and the spaces between them being a portal to this beautiful view beyond. He brought that concept together and integrated it into a single building.

I'm not crazy about the concrete exterior, but if you understand the context, the building makes a lot of sense.

Arts quad with the building in question in upper left. To the left of the picture, the hill goes down 100's of feet to the city of Ithaca and the lake.
https://aap.cornell.edu/sites/default/files/aerial-arts-quad.jpg

I couldn't find a good photo of the view from between the older buildings on the quad, but this one shows pretty well how they are lined up at the top of the hill, and the spaces between them offer views down the hill to Ithaca and the lake.



https://www.newyorkmeetings.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/CU-Clocktower.jpg

Anyway, I don't know much about architecture, but the big point of that class was understanding buildings as something that humans interact with, and I always thought that IM Pei did a masterful job of understanding the context of the building and making a design that was both very different but also very consistent. Though, wish he had used another material.