Pritzker Prize-winning architect I.M. Pei has died in New York at the age of 102. The prolific Chinese-American architecture legend’s death was confirmed by his firm Pei Cobb Freed Partners. The modernist was known for the bold geometry that characterized projects like the renovation of the Musée du Louvre in Paris, the Kennedy Library in Boston, and the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha.
The son of a prominent banker, Ieoh Ming Pei was born in Guangzhou, China in 1917. Pei emigrated to the U.S. in 1935 to study architecture at the University of Pennsylvania. He went on to pursue engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before continuing his studies at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design under the guise of Bauhaus masters Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer. Pei’s career led him to work with real estate mogul William Zeckendorf in 1948 before cofounding his eponymous practice alongside Henry N. Cobb and Eason H. Leonard in 1955.
Pei received his Pritzker Prize in 1983, four years after he was bestowed with the Gold Medal from the American Institute of Architects (AIA). He was additionally a recipient of the Praemium Imperiale for Architecture in 1989 and the Royal Institute of British Architecture’s (RIBA) Royal Gold Medal in 2010.
