I. M. Pei

Chinese-American architect whose career spanned the JFK Library (1979), the East Building of the National Gallery (1978), the Bank of China Tower (Hong Kong, 1990), and the Louvre Pyramid (1989). Trained at MIT and Harvard under Gropius and Breuer.

Pei's geometry was strict, rational, and unambiguously modernist; his materials were stone, concrete, and glass; his client list was sovereign nations and central banks. He was the establishment modernist par excellence.

Pritzker laureate 1983. The Louvre Pyramid was so controversial in 1989 that Mitterrand's chief of staff threatened resignation; it is now indistinguishable from the Louvre itself.