Words matter. These are the best I. M. Pei Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
I came, I studied architecture in America, so my technical background’s completely western. But my seventeen years, the formative years of one’s life, and I can’t say that the Chineseness in me is not there.
One thing I learn – I’ve been in practice now for half a century or more, and the most important ingredient for an architect to do a good building is to have a good client. I think a client counts for as much as fifty per cent.
A lasting architecture has to have roots.
I’ve never left China. My family’s been there for 600 years. But my architecture is not consciously Chinese in any sense. I’m a western architect.
We had a lot of difficulty in getting the French to accept the pyramid. They thought we were trying to import a piece of Egypt until I pointed out that their obelisk was also from Egypt and the Place des Pyramides is around the corner. Then they accepted it. The pyramid at the Louvre, though, is just the tip.
The Pyramids are perfect, but you can’t put the Pyramids in the middle of Manhattan. In the desert, the combination of light and form makes it perfect.
Architecture must not do violence to space or its neighbors.
I liked the America of Bing Crosby, Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton – it was all a dream, of course, but a very alluring dream for a young man from Canton.
The essence of architecture is form and space, and light is the essential element to the key to architectural design, probably more important than anything. Technology and materials are secondary.
Even a beautiful piece of work can be overshadowed, destroyed, by something else.
I arrived in the U.S.A. in 1935, to San Francisco. I got the boat from China, and I didn’t even speak English. I could read a little, perhaps write a little, but that was all. It was a 17-day journey, and I learnt to speak English from the stewards.
The first decent building I did with my own practice was a chapel in Taiwan.
I have a great love for nature. That must have started somewhere down back home, I think, because my family own one of the better known gardens in Soochow, so I played there, and I lived there, and so I must have absorbed something there. So I continue to have a great interest in nature.
A city, far from being a cluster of buildings, is actually a sequence of spaces enclosed and defined by buildings.
