This photoset by Australian photographer Tom Ross captures a geometric, concrete research laboratory in Boulder, Colorado, which was designed by architect IM Pei who passed away this week.
Ross, a long-time fan of the late Pritzker Prize-winning architect, ventured to the city's rural Table Mesa neighbourhood to capture Mesa Lab earlier this year.

Completed in 1961, Pei's Mesa Laboratory forms part of the National Center for Atmospheric Research on Boulder's outskirts. It has a dramatic, remote setting located on a hilltop that overlooks a golden valley to the west and south. Forested terrain and the Flatirons, which are massive rock formations, rise in the background.

Ross says it gives the impression that the complex has been "carved out of the cliff face". "The basic elements Pei has used from the Native American cliff dwellings are really beautiful," said the photographer. "Towers, curved spaces, and even the square joining to a long vertical line motif expressed in the cutouts and towers can be seen in the original dwellings."

He described the experience of shooting at high altitude as a "photographic dream" due to the quality of sunlight at high altitude. Ross' images capture the building in dark and light hours, with strong shadows featured in both.
"Like a lot of Pei's work it has the feeling of a religious building, a building made in worship of something greater," Ross continued. "Which I love in this cont...