I.m. pei returns to attend opening of suzhou museum
| The Suzhou Museum's main exhibits are bronzes and jades from between 2,500 years B.C. to 500 B.C. excavated from around Suzhou. |
| Oct. 5 - Chinese-American architect Ieoh Ming Pei, better known as I.M. Pei, has brought his love of geometric design back to his family's hometown in China with the opening this week of the new Suzhou Museum.
The angular white and gray building is the latest -- and some say the last -- major design by Pei, 89. New York-based Pei Partnership Architects, helmed by Pei's sons Chien Chung and Li Chung, helped design the 15,000-square-meter museum, which includes a 5,000-square-meter exhibition space, a 200-seat auditorium, research library and several Chinese gardens. ``He used the geometrical form as his basic element and repeated the theme throughout,'' said Jia Beisi, associate professor of architecture at the University of Hong Kong. ``The design looks like a big building cut into smaller pieces.'' Pei was born in 1917 to a Suzhou family. His father, Zu Yi, became head of Bank of China's branch in Hong Kong, the city where Pei spent his boyhood years before heading to the U.S. to study architecture at the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard. The architect, who won the Pritzker Prize in 1983, is best known for the glass Pyramid at the Louvre in Paris. Between 1982 and 1990, he designed the Bank of China Tower in Hong Kong, known locally as the ``Kitchen Knife'' for its tapered top and blade- like body. For the Suzhou Museum, Pei softened his rigid geometrical motif to blend with the city's delicate gardens, low-rise brick residences and teahouses along slender canals. Suzhou, known as the ``Venice of the East,'' was known for its poetry, opera and calligraphy, which flourished during the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644). The museum's main exhibits are bronzes and jades from between 2,500 years B.C. to 500 B.C. excavated from around Suzhou. It will also display works by Suzhou's best painters from the Ming Dynasty, and other exhibits on loan from the Shanghai Museum, according to a press release from Pei Partnership. ``With the white walls and grey tiles, very local building traits, he's integrated the local vernacular with his own geometrical style,'' said Jia. ``The project would touch on my relationship with my past, my ancestors, my old home,'' he said in the interview transcript. The Suzhou Museum, in the northeast of the old section of the city, adjoins the Zhong Wang Fu, a 19th-century residence, and the Garden of the Humble Administrator, a 16th-century garden listed by the United Nations as a World Heritage site.
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