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I. M. Pei Quotes


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Quotes by I. M. Pei

Showing 11-20 of 22 Quotes by I. M. Pei

In northern architecture - the cathedrals of Europe and all the little churches - the details, the carving of stone, become necessary because the light is not there to help you very much. You have to enrich surfaces. The desert reduces form to its simplest nature. There is no need for gargoyles or flying buttresses in the desert.

~I. M. Pei

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The Louvre for me is a wonderful experience. Because it continues; it didn't get cut off. It was actually a continuous involvement all the way, and a lot of people have come and gone, come and gone; but I'm still here.

~I. M. Pei

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Architecture must not do violence to space or its neighbors.

~I. M. Pei

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The first decent building I did with my own practice was a chapel in Taiwan.

~I. M. Pei

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Contemporary architects tend to impose modernity on something. There is a certain concern for history, but it's not very deep.

~I. M. Pei

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I arrived in the U.S.A. in 1935, to San Francisco. I got the boat from China, and I didn't even speak English. I could read a little, perhaps write a little, but that was all. It was a 17-day journey, and I learnt to speak English from the stewards.

~I. M. Pei

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I think the artistic side of architecture was natural to me. My mother was an artist and a poet.

~I. M. Pei

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I've never left China. My family's been there for 600 years. But my architecture is not consciously Chinese in any sense. I'm a western architect.

~I. M. Pei

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I came, I studied architecture in America, so my technical background's completely western. But my seventeen years, the formative years of one's life, and I can't say that the Chineseness in me is not there.

~I. M. Pei

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I have a great love for nature. That must have started somewhere down back home, I think, because my family own one of the better known gardens in Soochow, so I played there, and I lived there, and so I must have absorbed something there. So I continue to have a great interest in nature.

~I. M. Pei

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Biography

Nationality: American

Type: Architect

Born: April 26th, 1917

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