Bing Crosby is rarely cited in histories of 20th-century architecture, yet he had a significant role in shaping it. Ieoh Ming Pei?born in China in 1917 to Lien Kwun, an accomplished flute player, and Tsuyee, a bank manager?was inspired by the crooner?s dulcet tones and captivated by American college life as portrayed in his films. Consequently, an opportunity to study at Oxford was abandoned for the New World.
Commerce Court West and East in Toronto were designed by Pei Cobb Freed & Partners with Page and Steele. Photo by Art James for Canadian Architect.
Pei left Shanghai for San Francisco and took a train to Philadelphia, where he had been offered a place to study architecture at Penn. However, intimidated by the beaux arts renderings and attitudes discovered there, he quickly moved north to Boston and enrolled at MIT, where he received an undergraduate degree. In 1940 he moved again?albeit a shorter distance this time?to enrol in the graduate program in architecture at Harvard. Pei flourished under the supervision of Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer, both of whom valued his reconsiderations of tradition. Pei?s thesis design for a Museum for Chinese Art in Shanghai was subsequently published in Progressive Architecture, accompanied by an essay written by Gropius, and in 1948, in L?Architecture d?Aujourd?hui. At 57 storeys, the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce’s west tower was the tallest building in Canada until 1976. Photo by Art James for Canadian Architect...