He was unhappy with the focus on Beaux-Arts architecture at both schools, and spent his free time researching emerging architects, especially Le Corbusier.Īfter graduating, he joined the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) and befriended the Bauhaus architects Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer.
In 1935, he moved to the United States and enrolled in the University of Pennsylvania's architecture school, but he quickly transferred to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Raised in Shanghai, Pei drew inspiration at an early age from the garden villas at Suzhou, the traditional retreat of the scholar-gentry to which his family belonged. Ieoh Ming Pei FAIA RIBA ( / ˌ j oʊ m ɪ ŋ ˈ p eɪ/ YOH ming PAY Chinese: 貝聿銘 pinyin: Bèi Yùmíng Ap– May 16, 2019) was a Chinese-American architect.
