Notas del episodio
I. M. Pei was born in China in 1917 and grew up among his family's classical gardens in Suzhou, spaces built to steer how people move and feel. His mother died of cancer when he was 13, after he had prepared the opium pipes prescribed for her pain, and his banker father withdrew into work. In 1935 he left for America, drawn partly by Bing Crosby films about carefree college life, and clashed with Beaux-Arts teaching at Penn and MIT while falling for the international style. During World War II the National Defense Research Committee used his knowledge of construction to help design incendiary bombs. He then worked for New York developer William Zeckendorf on housing in Denver, Washington, and Kips Bay before designing the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado from bush-hammered concrete mixed with pink sandstone.
Jacqueline Kennedy chose Pei for the JFK Library partly because he was born the same year as her husband, starting a 15 year fight over sites and community opposition. At the same time, Boston's Hancock Tower was dropping glass onto sidewalks, forcing the replacement of over 10,000 windows and a tuned mass damper on the 58th floor. He answered with Dallas City Hall's 34 degree lean, a triangle-based East Building for the National Gallery using marble from a reopened Tennessee quarry, and the Louvre pyramid, opposed by a reported 90 percent of Parisians until a full-size cable mock-up changed minds. Later came the Fragrant Hill Hotel, Hong Kong's bamboo-inspired Bank of China Tower, Japan's mostly buried Miho Museum, and Doha's Museum of Islamic Art on its own island.
- How the Suzhou gardens shaped his idea that a building is a psychological experience, not just shelter
- Why the Hancock Tower's double-paned glass failed under sway, heat stress, and negative wind pressure
- The Louvre pyramid as an entrance hub for a sprawling underground network of galleries and tunnels
- The Bank of China Tower's exterior triangles carrying typhoon wind loads down to four corner columns
- His public anguish over Tiananmen Square in 1989 and a working life that ended at age 102