I.M. Pei

I.M. Pei was a Chinese born American architect whose modernist buildings became landmarks on several continents over a career spanning more than six decades. He won the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 1983 and is most widely known for the glass and steel pyramid he designed as the new entrance to the Louvre in Paris, a project that was highly controversial when proposed and later became one of the museum's defining features. Other major works include the East Building of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the Bank of China Tower in Hong Kong, and the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library near Boston, each combining geometric clarity with careful attention to light and materials. Pei's buildings are noted for reconciling a strict modernist vocabulary with the history and character of the sites and institutions that commissioned them.