Pei returns to roots with China Museum

For I.M. Pei, the sprawling white stucco museum that opened to great fanfare here last weekend is both a possible swan song and a second chance.

The only other building he has ever designed in mainland China, a luxury hotel completed in Beijing in 1982, was a disappointment that he says was rescued only by its beautiful setting in the woods. "I was saved by the trees," he said ruefully in an interview on Saturday.

This time Pei believes he has succeeded, he said. Returning to his ancestral home 160 kilometers, or 100 miles, northwest of Shanghai, he has designed a $40 million building that he hopes will help point the way toward a new type of architecture in the world's fastest-growing economy, a building that is Chinese in spirit yet ultimately modern.

"I've never done anything like this before," said Pei, the 89- year-old architect. "I've used gray and white, which are Suzhou colors. But the form is modern."

Since retiring in 1990 from his New York firm, Pei has traveled the world, putting his bright, geometric imprints on buildings in London, Luxembourg, Japan and the Middle East.

The Suzhou Museum is uniquely personal for him, he said. Although Pei was born south of here, in Guangzhou, and grew up mostly in Hong Kong and Shanghai, his forebears lived in Suzhou for hundreds of years. And he spent several memorable summers here as a youth. "My grandfather had a house and a garden here," he said. "I was one of the older grandsons. I should learn about the family business. So I came here three summers. I remember it well."

Pei's father was a prominent banker in pre-Communist China, serving at one time as governor of the country's central bank. Pei himself left China in 1935 to study architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and then Harvard. He did not return for nearly 40 years, when he led a group of American architects on a visit in 1974.

Later, at the behest of the Chinese government, he returned again to design the luxury hotel in Beijing, in the Fragrant Hills park sector. He said the project was fraught with delays and obstacles, including a shortage of quality materials. "It was an experience that discouraged me a lot about China," he said. "I didn't think China had a future. The young people didn't work. They just slept on the job."

Yet four years ago, when he was asked by the Suzhou government to build a museum on hallowed ground adjoining a complex of 19th- century historical structures and two gardens listed as Unesco World Heritage sites, Pei did not hesitate.

"I had roots here, and I felt I hadn't done right," he said, referring to the Fragrant Hills project. "I wanted to make amends, or to do something that will have a greater impact on architecture."

There were challenges. The museum would sit in the city's historic district, and some traditional houses would have to be moved or destroyed to make way for it, prompting complaints from residents.

And although government officials showed Pei great respect, he said, they also lectured him. While the museum should be modern, they said, it also had to be designed in Suzhou style. "I asked them how," he said, "and no one knew."

Pei toiled over design concepts that might blend East and West while avoiding some of the failures of the Beijing project, which was also a mix. He sought to remain true to China's tradition of courtyards and gardens yet rethink those models. He wanted neither a flat Western roof nor the arched gray tile roof typical of Suzhou. He found a solution that incorporated the idea of whitewashed walls but eliminated the gray tile roofs, accenting the building instead with gray stone. "Instead of gray tile roofs, I needed something that would develop volumes," he said, drawing a diagram on a paper showing an ascending roof pattern. "So I let the walls climb onto the roof. If the walls were stucco, why not the roof?"

The result is a 15,000-square-meter, or about 160,000 square- foot, museum that has many of the hallmarks of Pei's earlier designs his squares, rectangles and pyramids as well as an expansive use of glass and light. It also has traditional motifs, like a large Chinese garden with an artificial pond, a Chinese footbridge and a wall of thinly sliced rocks that yields an image of a series of mountain peaks against an older, whitewashed garden wall.

The timing of the opening was ideal, coinciding with the Mid- Autumn Festival, when the Chinese return home to pay homage to their ancestors. To celebrate the opening Pei invited more than 100 relatives and close friends from around the world. On Friday evening the Suzhou government gave a party for Pei with a show of traditional Chinese art and music, and on Saturday Pei held his own private party, a night of music, dance and fireworks.

When the museum opened to the public Saturday morning, unruly throngs pressed in a mad rush to see the new design. When one visitor was asked to leave, she pushed past four guards with her camera, shouting: "I haven't seen the garden. I bought a ticket. I'm going to see that garden." The scene was similar on Sunday.

Suzhou was a major cultural center during the Ming and Qing dynasties, and the museum houses relics from those periods, including jade, porcelain, calligraphy and paintings. Also on view is a special exhibition of works by three contemporary artists, Xu Bing, Cai Guoqiang and Zhao Wuji, all of whom left China to study or create away from home, just as Pei did.

Since he left his architectural practice in 1990, Pei said, he has accepted only commissions outside the United States, largely because of his experience in designing the addition to the Louvre in Paris, with its glass pyramid. "That project taught me that to know a country you have to work there on a project of consequence," he said. "So after that project I told myself, 'Let's learn about the world.'"

With his Suzhou Museum design, Pei said, he hopes to encourage and even inspire China, which is in the midst of a frantic building boom, to consider its own rich traditions, to be neither a slave to the past nor a weak imitator of the West.

Looking out from the 48th-floor lounge in the Shangri-La Hotel toward a series of huge real estate projects, Pei said: "Terrible things are happening. I can't stop it. I can't stop progress. But I hope it will be temporary." He said he hoped that in time the country would find its own path.

In China, "architecture and the garden are one," he said. "A Western building is a building, and a garden is a garden. They're related in spirit. But they are one in China."

As for whether the museum is his final project, Pei said: "Never predict the future. If you ask my wife, she'll say that's it. But if you ask me, I'm not sure it's the end. There are always challenges in life."

(C) 2006 International Herald Tribune. via ProQuest Information and Learning Company; All Rights Reserved