You may not know him as well as a movie star or a pop singer, but chances are that you have visited or walked by at least one of his works. The East Building, National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C, US, the Bank of China Tower in Hong Kong and the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha, Qatar, are just a few of his many creations.
The man behind these great buildings is Chinese-American architect Leoh Ming Pei. Born on April 26th, 1917 in a rich family in Guangzhou, China, and raised in Hong Kong and Shanghai, Pei had the chance to enjoy lots of dreamy Chinese gardens and mountainside temples. "These have always been the most important inspiration* to me as an architect," said Pei. When he was just a young boy, Pei realized that he loved design and it led to a dream of him becoming an architect and engineer.
At the age 18, he began studying architecture in the United States. He got his degree from MIT in 1939. Because of the start of World War II, he was unable to return to China. He stayed in the U.S. and completed his master's degree from Harvard. After starting his own architectural company in 1955, he went on to design such well-known buildings as the Kennedy Library in Boston and the glass pyramid at the Louvre Museum in Paris. In 1974, he returned to China for the first time. "Though I have lived in the US for nearly forty years, I'm still Chinese," Pei said when visiting his hometown.
Pei is good at bridging differences--ancient and modern, man-made and natural, East and West. On May 19th ，2019, the great architect left us forever, but his works will last in our mind all the time.
