At the exhibition Life as Architecture, we catch a glimpse of I.M. Pei’s unwavering conviction

I.M. Pei never staged a show of his own work in seventy years of practice.

In late 2024 the retrospective “Life Is Architecture” opened at M+ in Hong Kong—his first memorial exhibition—and became an instant sensation. From 26 April to 10 August 2025 the same show travels to the Power Station of Art in Shanghai, its 6,000 m³ of galleries transformed into a mind-palace of drawing, models and unseen footage. More than four hundred objects trace six themes through the architect’s private and professional worlds, the most comprehensive survey ever mounted on Chinese soil.

New York-based architect Yale Cho, who met Pei in 2000, designed the Shanghai hang. “His buildings are like Bach: simple modules repeated, layered, mirrored until they become space,” Cho says. A single 27-degree diagonal cut re-orders the rectangular halls, forcing visitors to pivot the way one does in a Suzhou garden. “Pei’s greatest works—Louvre, East Building, Bank of China Tower, Museum of Islamic Art—look monumental, yet they read at human scale because every giant volume is assembled from small, legible parts.”

Pei called architecture “the mirror of life.” Curator Lei Wang expands the motto: “Life means society, public, people, humanity. It is never only theory.” The man who refused manifestos, manifesto-less himself, let the work speak: reflective glass, honed stone, shafts of sky inserted into perfect geometry. “I dislike labels,” he once said. “Call a building modern, post-modern, structuralist—those words fade. What survives is the building, any era’s building.”

Born Guangzhou 26 April 1917, Pei moved with his banker father through Hong Kong, Shanghai and Suzhou. The International Hotel—Asia’s tallest tower when it opened in 1934—convinced the teenager that height and geometry could conjure futures. He sailed for the United States in 1935, left Penn after two Beaux-Arts weeks, and finished at MIT where a chance encounter with Le Corbusier’s books—and the man himself in black round glasses—re-wired his imagination. The same frames later became Pei’s quiet trademark.

War followed him. His 1940 MIT thesis proposed a mobile bamboo pavilion to bring education to refugees; he graduated into a world burning. While designing bombing analyses for the U.S. Defense Department he courted Eileen Loo, a Wellesley student he met in New York’s Grand Central during a hurricane-canceled train. They married five days after her 1942 graduation, then entered Harvard together—he architecture, she landscape—sketching post-war shelters between classes and air-raid drills.

Eileen abandoned her degree to raise four children yet never left the drafting table. She chose the white walls and fresh flowers that charmed Jacqueline Kennedy in 1964, tipping the young Pei firm—then sharing borrowed space—toward the coveted John F. Kennedy Library commission. Fifteen years of site fights, budget cuts and national grief later, the concrete and glass memorial rose on a reclaimed seaside landfill. Pei deflected praise: “Put the applause in my wife’s lap; without her this library would not stand.”

The same resilience carried him through the Louvre pyramids controversy—“bigger, bolder, more Parisian than Paris itself,” the French press finally admitted. He likened himself to bamboo: bend in any storm, never break. At ninety-two he summarized: “I have enjoyed learning every new place, its history, its culture. For me that is architecture.”

The Shanghai exhibition opens with those black horn-rimmed glasses resting alone in a vitrine. Through them we glimpse a century of migration, crisis, love and geometry—proof that a life, like a building, can be at once sharp and serene, monumental and intimately human.

The Impossible Dream: a Chinese architectural language

In December 1942 I.M. Pei enrolled at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design and placed himself under Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus. The crisp glass-and-steel boxes his mentor praised felt electrically modern, yet Pei sensed their silence toward place, climate and memory. Two years later he scribbled a note to a classmate and titled it “The Impossible Dream.” “How,” he asked, “do we give Chinese architecture a voice without borrowing a single upturned roof or ceramic dragon?”

His 1946 master’s thesis answered with a project never meant to be built: the Shanghai Chinese Art Museum. A plain concrete slab, pierced by sunken courtyards that caught sky and redirected breeze, turned the museum inside-out like a garden. At the threshold he tucked a teahouse—“a living room for the city,” he wrote—so the smell of jasmine and gossip would drift through the galleries. Gropius, rather than taking offense, applauded the rebellion: “Permanent tradition, uncompromised innovation.”

The same dialogue—modern form, Chinese breath—recurs across six decades. It floats the Tunghai University campus above a Taiwanese flood-plain, slips water courts through Beijing’s  Fragrant Hill Hotel, and finally condenses into the white walls and grey granite of the Suzhou Museum, where fire-tinted stone panels are pinned against a wall like a Song-dynasty scroll. The boy who once played hide-and-seek inside the Lion Grove rockery had learned to let time finish the design.

Property and the city: “We will change all this”

In 1948 Pei surprised Harvard by saying yes to William Zeckendorf, the swaggering Canadian developer who was rebuilding post-war American downtowns block by block. Zeckendorf’s mantra was simple: cities are organisms, not checkboards. Pei’s first assignment was his own office—an oval room wrapped in teak, a cedar-wood bar that rose like a ship’s mast. A 1955 tabloid headline roared: Tycoon Headquarters—Property Czar Zeckendorf Plots America’s Future Inside a Dream Office!

Together they toured the country in Zeckendorf’s DC-3, spotting blight from the air. At Kips Bay Plaza (1957) Pei hoisted two 21-storey slabs of raw concrete at opposite edges of a Manhattan super-block and left twelve thousand square metres of grass between them—an unheard-of luxury for middle-income housing. In Philadelphia’s Society Hill he replaced brothels with brick row-houses and pocket parks; both districts still trade at premium prices. “Without those years,” Pei later admitted, “I could never have survived the Louvre.”

Touching the blade: the pyramid wars

Pei liked edges you could feel. For the East Building of the National Gallery of Art (1978) he sliced the trapezoidal site into two razor-thin triangles, then demanded a corner so acute the stone-cutters refused. The <20° knife survives; tourists stroke it like a talisman. Inside, a lattice ceiling became a skylight overnight when Pei woke convinced that “light must fall from heaven, not from a grid.” One million visitors arrived in the first eight weeks.

The habit of sharpening form culminated in the Louvre. François Mitterrand needed no competition: every museum director he polled named the same architect. Pei’s response was almost childlike—a single, transparent pyramid planted in Napoleon’s courtyard. Paris called it a grave, a Disney gadget, an Egyptian insult. He answered with a full-scale mock-up of cable and carbon-fiber; 60,000 Parisians walked through the ghost, measured the horizon and surrendered. New glass was invented to erase the green tint of modern float; sailors from Brittany supplied the rigging logic. When the pyramid opened, Tadao Ando flew from Osaka, stood beneath the glass and wept: “Old Paris and new Paris face each other, not in opposition but in awe.”

Bamboo and stone, space and time

Pei’s career reads like a conversation between two materials: the tensile resilience of bamboo, the patient gravity of stone. The Bank of China Tower (1990) rises like a stack of bamboo nodes, each higher and lighter, its diagonal bracing borrowed from a junk’s sail. Feng-shui masters complained the X-shaped braces were “bad stars”; Pei painted them silver, planted cascading water in the podium and watched unease dissolve.

At Fragrant Hill he persuaded China’s leaders to abandon a high-rise hotel inside the Forbidden City’s sight-line and accept a low, courtyard-based retreat instead; the so-called “Pei height limit” still protects palace roofs. Grey tiles, white stucco, and snow-white marble channel the seasons through borrowed views exactly as in a scholar’s garden. “Look backward before stepping forward,” he told young Chinese architects in 1980. “Speed is not the same as progress.”

Seventeen years later he returned to his ancestral Suzhou and, at almost ninety, designed a museum that is more void than mass: thin granite eaves float above water, while a garden wall of stacked “Mi-family” stones is torched and brushed until it reads like ink wash. “Only China lets you play with time itself,” he smiled. “We soaked these rocks for twenty years so history could finish the drawing.”

From sanctuary to sanctuary

A diagonal spine runs through the Shanghai retrospective: at one end the 1978 East Building’s knife-edge triangle, at the other the 2008 Museum of Islamic Art, its octagonal towers stepping across the Doha waterfront like prayer stones. Between them lies a lifetime of learning how far geometry can travel.

The、Museum of Islamic Art began when a Qatari sheikh asked the ninety-year-old architect to “give us a building that belongs to every Muslim century.” Pei read Ibn Khaldun, flew to Cairo, spent dawn inside the 9th-century Ibn Tulun mosque and found his theme: a dome that morphs from square to octagon to circle, sunlight stitching the shift. The finished stone façade rises from the Gulf like a piece of carved light; inside, a chandelier drops to human height so pilgrims and tourists share the same breath.

Two chapels complete the circle. The Luce Chapel (1963) in Taichung—four curved concrete petals parted by a skylight—was Pei’s first built work in Asia; he kept a photograph of it by his desk until retirement. Forty-five years later he folded a sheet of paper into a cone, snipped the edges and produced the Miho Chapel near Kyoto: a tear-shaped fan of glass and steel that catches mountain mist each dawn. “I began with a church,” he said at the 2012 dedication, aged ninety-five, “and I end with a church. A circle closes.