Connecting the Past and the Present by I M Pei@Arch

Nicolai Ouroussoff writes:

The clean, chiseled forms of the Museum of Islamic Art have a tranquillity that distinguishes it in an age that often seems trapped somewhere between gimmickry and a cloying nostalgia. Part of the allure may have to do with I. M. Pei, the museum's architect.

Photo: Museum of Islamic Art

Mr. Pei reached the height of his popularity decades ago with projects like the East Building of the National Gallery of Art in Washington and the Louvre pyramid in Paris.

Photo: Jacques Brinon/Associated Press

The Museum of Islamic Art is on a small man-made island that is accessible from a short bridge. Since then he has been an enigmatic figure at the periphery of the profession. Now, at 91 and near the end of a long career, Mr. Pei seems to be enjoying a kind of revival.

Photo: Keiichi Tahara

Students look at a ceramic cenotaph from Central Asia that is part of an exhibition at the Museum of Islamic Art. The Museum of Islamic Art's design is rooted in an optimistic worldview that the past and the present can co-exist harmoniously. Its ideals are a throwback to a time when America's overseas ambitions were still cloaked in a progressive agenda.

Photo: Hassan Ammar/Associated Press

An interior view of the museum’s atrium dome and oculus. "Contemporary architects tend to impose modernity on something," he said in an interview. "There is a certain concern for history but it's not very deep. I understand that time has changed, we have evolved.But I don't want to forget the beginning. A lasting architecture has to have roots."

Photo: Keiichi Tahara

This moderation should come as no surprise to those who have followed Mr. Pei's career closely. His design for the Kennedy Library, which was completed 16 years after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, seemed to be an act of hope, as if the values that Kennedy's generation embodied could be preserved in stone, steel and glass.

His work since then has never lost its aura of measured idealism. It reached its highest expression in the National Gallery of Art's East Building, a composition of angular stone forms completed in 1978 that remains the most visible emblem of modern Washington.

Photo: National Gallery of Art, via Associated Press

Since that popular triumph Mr. Pei has often seemed to take the kind of leisurely, slow-paced approach to design that other architects, no matter how well established, can only dream of.

Photo: Hassan Ammar/Associated Press

Mr. Pei at his home in New York.More recently he has lived in semi-retirement. He rarely takes on more than a single project at a time. Such an attitude runs counter to the ever-accelerating pace of the global age. But if Mr. Pei's methods seem anachronistic, they also offer a gentle resistance to the short-sightedness of so many contemporary cultural undertakings.

Photo: Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

@Source: http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2008/12/14/arts/20081214-OURO_index.html