Tribute I M Pei (1917-2019)

Kenneth Frampton, in his book Modern Architecture: A Critical History, in chapter four (Place, Production & Scenography, International Theory and Practice since 1962), discussed the imaginative interpretation of Fuller’s project on geodesic domes, Kikutake on Marine City, Isozaki on the Gunma Prefectural Museum, Rogers & Pianos’ Pompidou Center and Foster + Partners’ Hong Kong-Shanghai Bank.

- Manoj Parmar

There is no mention of I M Pei’s work in this chapter though. However it is very apparent that Frampton has argued the advent of technocratic utopia as late modernist avant garde as a response to advancing capitalism. It is this fundamental obsession that led many architects to produce shimmering high-aesthetic, high-tech architecture. The work of I M Pei resonates with somewhat similar traits in architecture but with reducing codes, and a lesser burden with semantics and quotations to scintillating forms in populist sense. It was his idiosyncratic obsessions, partly due to his training and partly due to the time period of late modernist ideological emptiness, seeking alternate variations in terms of modern or no modern (postmodern). He remained subservient to modernist