Word: pei
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Walton remembered his visit to Ieoh Ming Pei's New York office. Pei went over his works carefully. "He explained how he had developed, what was his high mark and his low in his own estimation. When he showed his last two buildings, I remarked that each seemed to be quite a great step forward. He looked at me and said, 'Yes, but I feel that I am on the verge of my greatest work.' Mrs. Kennedy almost gave him the job right then and there...
...Pei had very obvious qualifications. Of all the architects, he had the most experience in city planning, and the Kennedy Library will be an immense city planning project. (It has been estimated that five million people a year may come to the library in the first few years. Consider the effect of that little increase in Harvard Square traffic. Or consider the parking problem.) Again, he has experience in Cambridge--he designed the Cecil and Ida Green Building, Center for the Earth Sciences, which towers over M.I.T...
...Pei was born in 1917, the same year as John Kennedy (another factor the family considered--many of the architects were not of the same generation as the President) in Canton, China. He decided to become an architect when he saw his first skyscraper at the age of 16, came to the United States two years later, graduated from M.I.T., and got his master's at Harvard, where he served on the Faculty from 1945 to 1948. He was also a member of the Visiting Committee of the School of Design for five years...
...Pei's career has been outstanding, particularly for a man of his age, though Walton agreed that there are men of greater eminence in American architecture. "We weren't running a kind of contest for the greatest architect in America," he explained. "We wanted the man who would do best by this one building. It isn't as though we'd picked an unknown, but the choice was a gamble of sorts, a hedged gamble. The hedge, of course, is the work he's already done...
Much of that work was done for William Zeckendorf's Webb and Knapp firm. In 1955 Pei founded his own firm, I. M. Pei and Associates. A great deal of his early work was in city planning, but the two buildings that impressed Walton and Mrs. Kennedy were a weather research station set against the mountains in Boulder, Colo., and the Newhouse Communications Center in Syracuse...