Early life and education
Pei was born in Guangzhou, in Guangdong, China on April 26, 1917, to a prominent family from Suzhou, Jiangsu. His family has lived in Suzhou since the 15th century. His father, a banker, was later the director of the Bank of China and the governor of the Central Bank of China. His family later moved to Hong Kong, where he lived until he finished junior high school, and then moved to Shanghai when his father took up the directorship of Bank of China in Shanghai. The Pei family's ancestral residence is in a renowned garden in Suzhou, now part of the World Heritage Site listed Classical Gardens of Suzhou. The house was called the Garden of the Lion Forest, and consisted of many rock sculptures carved naturally by water. Pei loved how the buildings and the nature were combined, and especially liked the way light and shadow mixed.
His first education was at St. Paul's College, Hong Kong and then at Saint John's University, Shanghai before moving to the United States to study architecture at the age of 18 at the University of Pennsylvania. He received a Bachelor of Architecture degree from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1940. He is a 1940 recipient of the Alpha Rho Chi Medal, the MIT Traveling Fellowship, and the AIA Gold Medal. He then studied at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Shortly after his studies there, he was a member of the National Defense Research Committee in Princeton, New Jersey.
In 1944, he returned to Harvard, studying under Walter Gropius, who was previously associated with the Bauhaus. He received a Master's degree in Architecture in 1946. He was a member of the Harvard faculty subsequently attaining the rank of assistant professor. He received the Wheelwright Traveling Fellowship in 1951 and became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1954.
Career
In 1948, William Zeckendorf hired Pei to work at the real estate development corporation Webb and Knapp in a newly created post, Director of Architecture. While at Webb and Knapp, Pei worked on many large-scale architectural and planning projects across the country and designed his buildings mostly in the manner of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.
Pei founded his own architectural firm in 1955, which was originally known as I. M. Pei and Associates and, later, I. M. Pei & Partners until 1989 when it became known as Pei Cobb Freed & Partners recognizing James Ingo Freed and Henry N. Cobb.
From Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I._M._Pei
Text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Text_of_the_GNU_Free_Documentation_License
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