LEGO Architecture Louvre 21024 Building Instructions page 8

The Architect
Ieoh Ming Pei
Ieoh Ming Pei was born in China in 1917 and travelled
to the USA at the age of 17 to study architecture at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Inspired by
the work of Le Corbusier and the new International Style
of architecture, he continued to Harvard's Graduate
School of Design, where he met Walter Gropius and
Marcel Breuer, two leaders of the European Bauhaus
movement.
In 1955, after working for the New York firm of Webb
& Knapp on a variety of large-scale structures across
the USA, Pei established his own firm, I. M. Pei and
Associates. Pei and his team worked on a number of
major projects, including the Kennedy Library in Boston,
Dallas City Hall in Texas and the new East Building of
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Washington's National Gallery of Art. It was this last
building that would bring him to the attention of those in
charge of the Louvre renovation project.
Pei would be the first foreign architect to work on
the Louvre, and many in France were skeptical that
such a prestigious national project had been given
to an architect with a reputation as the 'master of
modern architecture'. He himself was acutely aware
that 'the history of Paris was embedded in the stones
of the Louvre'. Though his suggestions — not least
the glass pyramid — initially received much criticism,
the renovation was a great success and the Louvre's
pyramid would become his most famous structure.