A Pilgrim's Prize

Q.: Mr. Pel, can you tell us what the new Kennedy library will look like?

A.: No. All I have is a blank sheet of paper.

Q.: There's nothing on that piece of paper?

A.: Nothing at all.

Thus, at a press conference given last week by the Kennedy family, Canton-born Architect Ieoh Ming Pei accepted a commission that any architect would have sold his ancestral home to get: designing the John F. Kennedy Memorial Library at Harvard. Says Painter William Walton, who, along with Jacqueline Kennedy, served on the selecting committee: "We chose Pei because his work is exciting and expressive, and we felt that he was on the verge of even greater work. He's every architect's second choice--next to themselves."

A man who has avoided headlines while putting his mark on more than 15 U.S. cities, Pei, 47, has won double awards for his dramatic, clean-cut towers and town houses in Philadelphia's Society Hill (TIME, Nov. 6). He is rejuvenating 160 acres of Cleveland, is master planner with vast authority of a $200 million reconstruction project in Boston, has a say-so in the downtown redevelopments in Los Angeles, Oklahoma City, Providence and Columbus. Winning a Federal Aviation Agency commission, Pei has designed a universal trim, pentagonal control tower now being installed in at least 25 U.S. airports. More than any other architect, Pei is engaged in a vast revamping of the U.S. cityscape.

Big Deals & Good Design. Building has fascinated Pei (pronounced pay) from childhood. A Chinese banker's son, he came to the U.S. for his education, won top grades at M.I.T., and was invited by Walter Gropius to teach architecture at Harvard. After World War II, when Communism cut short his childhood dream of rebuilding his homeland, Pei turned to his adopted land's growing problem--the rejuvenation of the city.

Pei had observed that scheme after scheme to beautify America's topsy-built cities failed because the true client was the real estate entrepreneur rather than the aesthetician. Pei signed on with Manhattan Realtor William Zeckendorf to see if a creative balance could be struck between big deals and good design. The working relationship produced Manhattan's Kips Bay Plaza apartments, Montreal's Place Ville Marie and Denver's Mile High Center. But a decade ago, Pei decided it was time to begin striking out on his own: he became a U.S. citizen and set up his own firm.

No Handstands. It is ironic that the commission for a monument should go to an architect who believes that his colleagues are too often overwhelmed with their own edifice complex. Pei holds that doing a handstand in marble on a street-corner site while ignoring the neighbors is an irresponsible posture for an architect. "What's there must influence what comes later," he says. "But architecture must not do violence to space or to its neighbors." Architects must, he believes, "realize that open space is just as important as the shaft, the pile, the solid masses."

While architecture to Pei is not sculpture to live in, he has won the high regard of his profession for the sensitive disciplined design of his individual buildings. His nine award-winning projects number among them Pittsburgh's Washington Plaza apartments, Honolulu's Pan Pacific Center, and the new National Airlines terminal at New York's Kennedy Airport. Pei's projects circle the world from Formosa's Luce Chapel to city planning in Tel Aviv.

While the Kennedy Memorial Library lacks a fixed site or a solid program, it is typical of Pei that he is beginning with such problems as traffic. "If Coventry Cathedral drew 7,000,000 visitors last year," he muses, "what will our problems be in the Boston-Cambridge area?" Pei approaches his prize project as would a pilgrim--from afar, and questioning every painful decision along the way. He is highly aware that more than $10 million in pennies and six-figure pledges has been raised for the library by donations from foreign governments, labor unions, and even schoolchildren around the world. The structure must embrace archives, a museum of material from the late President's 1,000 days, and a Harvard-run working institute for political affairs. Until that faith and those facts are firmly set, nothing is likely to appear on blueprint.

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