MEDIA STUDIES

THIS PAST SUMMER, Hong Kong’s M+ museum opened “I. M. Pei: Life Is Architecture,” the first full-scale retrospective devoted to the work of the Guangzhou-born, Pritzker Prize–winning Chinese American architect. Filling half the museum’s exhibition floor and containing some four hundred objects, M+’s presentation is a comprehensive examination of a figure responsible for some of the most consequential building projects of the past sixty years—including the East Building of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, in 1978; the controversial modernization of the Louvre, Paris, in 1983–89; and the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha, Qatar, in 2008. Organized by Aric Chen and Shirley Surya, the show is also timely, tacitly engaging two questions that have animated recent academic discussions of Pei’s oeuvre: Why, compared with his peers, has Pei been so under-theorized and under-historicized? (Consider by comparison the reception of the so-called New York Five, who, as early as the 1970s, were championed by historians such as Kenneth Frampton and Colin Rowe.) And second: What direction should future Pei scholarship take? In fact, both queries were first posed by architecture historian K. Michael Hays during “Rethinking Pei: A Centenary Symposium,” a major two-part, two-city symposium that took place in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Hong Kong in 2017.

To properly examine the first question, we may turn to the work of Beatriz Colomina. Writing in 2014 on Mies van der Rohe’s publishing practice and pavilion design, the historian argued that modern architecture “became ‘modern’” not through the use of particular materials or forms but “by engaging with the media: with publications, competitions, exhibitions.” For Colomina, the making of manifestos and “little architectural magazines” is the precondition of “modern” architecture. She writes, “Adolf Loos didn’t exist as a public figure before his polemic writings in the pages of newspapers and in his own little magazine Das Andere,” and “Le Corbusier didn’t exist before his magazine L’esprit nouveau.”

From this perspective, Pei is the antithesis of a modernist architect. Throughout his career, he eschewed Corbusier-style manifestos, little magazines, and fetish-ized experiments with architectural representations—i.e., the so-called language of the avant-garde—opting instead to communicate his design ideas directly to the public and clients through television, newspaper interviews, and documentary films. For academic audiences, Pei’s media savviness may have been construed as a lack of seriousness—“Pei gets very little credit for all the technical innovation,” architect Thomas Leslie has said—and recent scholarship has sought to act as a corrective in this regard. 

Yet Pei’s fame is undeniably seductive, and the M+ exhibition, for its part, is enamored of the architect’s presence in the press, including, for instance, strangely celebratory section titled “Pei in the News: Fame and Controversy” with blown-up magazine covers and news article cutouts haphazardly displayed on two angled walls. Elsewhere, in a gallery devoted to the Louvre modernization, the show positioned a large steel replica of the pyramid above a set of displays, nodding, it seems, to a legendary 1985 media stunt that is credited with “taming” public outcry against the renovation project. At Cour Napoléon—in the pyramid’s exact location—Pei displayed a full-scale mock-up of the pyramid’s skeleton made from carbon-fire cables, revealing the form to be unobtrusive and strikingly transparent. Circulating widely in the French and international media, images of this model successfully countered portrayals of the pyramid in conservative newspapers as a dark and solid mass. 

As M+ implicitly reveals, the smooth ascent of Pei’s architectural career depended on a tireless choreography of diplomacy. The show calls our attention to a new condition in which the manifesto architecture of the academy has been replaced by a publicity-driven architecture of the mass media, the latter, as Pei’s work has shown, in fact caught in an opaque entanglement of globalized professionalism, capitalism, and geopolitical power.

IN ORDER TO SUBVERT the relationship between media and power embedded in Pei’s work, it is not enough to ask, à la both Hays and the M+ show, what new directions the scholarship of Pei should take. Instead, we must ask a more consequential question: How might Pei’s architecture itself be reimagined? To that end, I would like to point to two new projects on display at the Hong Kong exhibition.

The first piece is a set of architecture models, constructed mainly with bamboo and ropes. Realized by students from the Hong Kong University Faculty of Architecture, the models represent a radio tower and scaled-down theater drawn from Pei’s undergraduate thesis project at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1940, titled Standardized Propaganda Units for War Time and Peace Time China. Thought lost until its accession in May 2008 by the MIT Libaries in Boston, the thesis project describes temporary, modular, multifunctional structures that can be assembled, disassembled, and moved around in remote villages in China whose residents are largely illiterate. A “Ministry of Propaganda” in the “capitol,” meanwhile, sends out “theatrical groups, motion pictures, museum exhibits, speakers, graphic materials” to be presented at these touring Standardized Propaganda Units, or SPUs. 

In realizing a model of an SPU, the HKU students remained faithful to Pei’s plans, yet they soon ran into a practical problem: The architect did not provide clear instructions on how the radio tower should meet the earth. The students thus deviated from Pei’s design, inventing a system whereby metal bundles anchor the tower to the ground. But why, I wonder, did they stop at the minor technical adjustment? If the technical aspect of Pei’s student work turned out to be flawed, might its function likewise warrant a rethink?

Indeed, this project—one of few by the architect that was unencumbered by the demands of a public or private client—reveals a different side of Pei. Reflecting on the work in 2007, Pei remarked, “What was on my mind at that time was my despair for China. It was the helplessness and ignorance of the masses.” While foreshadowing the postwar Communist propaganda apparatus, with its revolutionary operas and outdoor cinema, the thesis project showed Pei as a young nationalist troubled by the image of a backward, illiterate, weak nation; in fact, in his booklet he cites American missionary Arthur H. Smith’s racist document of the country Village Life in China. Already attuned to the power of the mass media, he casts himself as an authoritative figure in the project of socially engineering the masses. At the same time, by turning to the form and technology of modernist architecture, Pei commands the authority of an emerging class of transnational capitalists, failing to address China’s native struggle toward modernity.

Though the students’ deviation from Pei’s plan was limited to a technical modification, their intervention seems to me like a good starting point for undoing the sly mediatic encoding power and capital that have defined Pei’s life and work from the beginning of his professional career. It represents the possibility of reimagining—and reinventing—the narrative of Pei’s work from the perspective of the masses whose lived experiences may be directly implicated by it.

A similar undoing takes place in the show’s “Real Estate and Urban Redevelopment” section; there, two inconspicuous photographs of Pei’s Bank of China Tower (1989) cast a quiet spell. One, taken by Australian photographer John Nye in 1989, captures Pei’s brand-new tower at the height of Hong Kong’s building boom. Set right in the middle of the frame, in its glass façade reflecting the glowing sun, the humongous building is just slightly out of place. Behind it sits a forested hillside dotted with expensive homes, pressing the claustrophobic residential high-rises where working-class families reside ever closer to the financial centers represented by the Bank of China Tower, governmental buildings, and other commercial skyscrapers, including the HSBC Tower, built by Norman Foster, which is partially cut off by the frame. In the front is Hong Kong’s signature landmark, the waterfront of the Victoria Harbor.