I. M. Pei

Ieoh Ming Pei (Canton, 28 april 1917), better known as i. m. Pei, is a Chinese-American architect. He is seen as one of the leading architects of the 20th century. ==Biography[ Edit] == Pei is the son of a former Director of the Bank of China. The House in which he grew up is part of the classical gardens of Suzhou, which is a UNESCO World Heritage sitesince 1997 on the stand.

He studied at St. Paul's College in Hong Kong and St. John's University in Shanghai before he at the age of 18 to the United States to study architecture at the University of Pennsylvania. He earned a bachelor's degree in architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1940. He has still to the Harvard Graduate School of Design Graduate. In 1944 he returned to Harvard where he studied under Walter Gropius. He got a master's degree in architecture in 1946. In 1948, William Zeckendorf Pei to took at the company of Webb and Knapp where he "director of architecture" was. At this company, he worked on many large projects in the country and he designed his buildings in the style of Mies van der Rohe. He got the Wheelwright traveling fellowship in 1951.

In 1954 he became a naturalized American citizen. A year later, Pei began his own architectural Office in New York, I.M. Pei & Partners, renamed Pei Cobb Freed & Partners in 1989.

Pei in 1983 won the Pritzker Prize, the most important Architecture Prize in the world, and in 1989 he was awarded the prestigious Praemium ImperialeJapanese art price. In the USA he received the National Medal of Arts in 1988 and awarded the Medal of Freedom in 1993. Also in 1993, he was appointed officer of the French Légion d'honneur. ==Famous buildings[ Edit] == Well-known buildings of Pei are:


 * the glass pyramids in the courtyard of the Louvre Museum in Paris
 * the Musée d'Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean in Luxembourg
 * the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland (Usa)
 * the John f. Kennedy Library in Boston (USA)
 * the Bank of China Tower in Hong Kong
 * the new wing of the Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin
 * the Suzhou Museum in Suzhou
 * the Museum of Islamic art in Doha