I shouldn’t complain about the barren cultural landscape of Ennis Co. Clare. I work best with limited choice and under constraint.
The yearly sale of books withdrawn from stock at the local library is a rare opportunity to stock up on culture, at 1 euro each for adult books or 2 kids’ books for 1 euro. There I buy books by the kilo. Some of these for genuine interest in the subject matter, others because they are simply too good a bargain to leave behind. “The Architecture of I.M. Pei” was one of them. A couple of kilos heavy, gorgeous photography, and a sticker at the back indicating an original sale price of £44.40.
I.M. Pei was not a totally foreign name. Although the first time I ever heard it, I was, like my French contemporaries, stunned. Why was this unknown Chinese man picked by Francois Mitterrand to build a glass pyramid in the courtyard of the Louvres? At the time, I didn’t know that he wasn’t a newcomer in the architectural world, nor did I question why the right-wing media were planting nationalist seeds in the public mind.
In the last month, I went through my loot of 1 euro ex-library stock books. If I left “The Architecture of I.M. Pei” last, it was because he’s a man, and I figured his subject matter rather sterile. I was wrong.
I fell in love at first sight. Not with the modernist blocks of concrete - I grew up in one - they seemed like a good idea at one time. I fell in love with his I.M. Pei's brain. The fact that I.M. Pei is eastern is probably why I discovered such a connection with his way of thinking and operating. Although he is a master, and a man with a vision, he has done his best work under huge constraints and controversy. Of course architecture is one of those areas where you don’t create in a vacuum. You have to consider not only your patrons, but building regulations, budgets, angry citizens and so on, not to mention the eternal tensions between the aesthetic and the practical.
Instead of bulling his way head-on, Pei has had to make an endless number of alterations, and about-faces, in some cases stretching projects to decades and moving them from site to site. To design a symphony center, he was paired with an “accoustician”. “… Johnson objected that the columns would interfere with the sound. The columns went in. Pei wanted carpet on the orchestra floor. Johnson objected, saying it would absorb too much sound. The carpet was abandoned. etc”
Pei was hugely skilled at people relationships, in the art of convincing and negociating, and was blessed with Zen-like patience and restraint. The most interesting insight in the workings of his mind however is how his creativity expressed itself under the multiplicity of constraints. The solution, the perfect solution, the one that not only solved the technical problem at hand but was also supremely elegant, would suddenly impose itself to him. But it was no compromise. It was in fact a better solution than the original one.
An example from his mid-career was the East building he designed for the National Gallery in Washington. His blank canvas was an awkward triangular site. His solution was to use triangles, and more triangles, and more triangles. And because you can’t hang paintings face-to-face in the sharp corners of a triangle, he simply walled these corners off and used them to put elevators, air conditioning conduits and other services.
Like women, Pei being a foreigner, of relatively humble origins and a not-too-forceful person by nature, has had to deal with and bow to an unending string of sometimes not-so-enlightened persons. The boundaries would close around him, he would concede, appease, and then find a way that would leave his opponents speechless, because it took into account their concerns, their rules, and turn them on their head. The ultimate way of thinking outside the box.
Photo by Nora
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