I. M. (Ieoh Ming) Pei, the architect behind the design of some of the world’s most recognizable and celebrated buildings and spaces, has died at the age of 102, according to a report from the New York Times.
I. M. Pei.
Image: Ingbet Gruttner, courtesy Pei Cobb Freed and Partners
Pei was awarded the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 1983, with the jury describing him as having given the 20th century “some of its most beautiful interior spaces and exterior forms.” He was also fêted with the American Institute of Architects’ Gold Medal and the Royal Institute of British Architects’ Royal Gold Medal, among other accolades.
Among his most well-known projects were the Louvre Pyramid in Paris, the Bank of China Tower in Hong Kong and the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston.
His New York-based practice, established in 1955 as I. M. Pei and Associates, has built projects across the US and in more than 30 countries internationally, including two in Australia.
In the 1970s Pei and Partners collaborated with Australian practice Bates Smart and McCutcheon (BSM) to create Collins Place, a two-tower complex in Melbourne’s CBD, which in 1975 was the largest single building in Australia.
Interior of the “Great Space” at Collins Place by Pei and Partners and Bates Smart and McCutcheon.
Image: Courtesy Bates Smart
A vast, one-acre, six-storey-high sunken plaza, dubbed the “Great Space” sits between the two towers. It is covered in a glazed space frame, the first of its kind in Australia.
The project was the result of a recommendation made by Vincent Ponte, a New York city planner who visited Australia in late 1969 and suggested that “ANZ, AMP Society and Mainline Corporation get together to use their total of three and a third acres [approximately 13,500 square metres] to develop a joint venture,” reported the Sydney Morning Herald on 20 June, 1971.
“Melbourne has a long-established tradition of pedestrian shopping arcades,” Ponte told the Sydney Morning Herald.
“This one, however, carries forward the local tradition to a scale of sophistication and grandeur comparable in its effect to the familiar shopping galleries of Italy with their high-class canopies or even to London’s former Crystal Palace.
“The whole project, then, becomes a small community within itself – office building which also have provision for people to shop, drink, talk, meet, relax and enjoy themselves.”
The design collaboration came about following a study tour undertaken by BSM partner Osborn McCutcheon in the late 1960s. “McCutcheon had been impressed with Pei’s Place Ville Marie in Montreal, Canada (1955-66), which had consolidated a number of sites and provided a mixed-use concept for the entire development,” wrote Philip Goad in Bates Smart: 150 Years of Australian Architecture.
“While the project was an aesthetic success in terms of its material quality and was contemporaneous with similar developments across Canada and the United States, in urbanist terms, Collins Place represented the dramatic consequences of the consolidation of numerous sites in the CBD where the final complex could change entirely the quality and scale of the existing streetscape.”
In 2012, Pei Cobb Freed and Partners and DWP Suters were appointed to design an $84 million office tower in Darwin by pearl magnates the Paspaley family. The building, the Charles Darwin Centre, completed in 2015, is described as “an iconic state-of-the-art building in the heart of the northern capital” and is the home of the Northern Territory government offices. The building received an Award for Commercial Architecture at the 2016 NT Architecture Awards.
