Finding Roots

By I.M. Pei

China's recent development has almost become a cliche among businessmen and academics alike, and nowhere is his prosperity more manifest than in China's construction boom. New buildings are rising everywhere.

Between 1979 and 1982, I. M. Pei designed one of the first new hotels in China after the inauguration of its economic reform. It was an attempt at a third way, a new architectural vernacular for a China that was soon to be transformed. The site Pei chose for his experiment was in the suburbs of Beijing. Known as Xiangshan, or Fragrant Hill, the site was once part of an imperial hunting reserve famous for its autumn foliage.

The result was an unassuming complex that tapered to the sloping hill, immersed amidst the maples and pines of Fragrant Hill. The off-white stucco on the walls, gray tiles on the roof, and geometric shapes of the windows were clearly reminiscent of the classical gardens of Confucian literati. The Pei family itself owned one of the most acclaimed examples of these gardens, the Lion Forest in Suzhou.

Having designed works like the East Wing of the National Gallery of Art and the John F. Kennedy Library and established himself as the leader of high modernism, Pei returned to the country that he left at the age of seventeen and sought to rediscover his own roots. The Fragrant Hill was a project of root-finding for I. M. Pei. But since then it has obviously become much more than merely a personal project. The Fragrant Hill has become a source of inspiration for the young architects of China. In this exclusive interview, the Harvard Asia Pacific Review meets I. M. Pei.

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Pei: It was quite an accident actually. Nothing like "I've got to be an architect when I grow up." I just didn't want to be a banker like my father. It was one of those things that could have gone either way. I went to MIT and wanted to learn about building. There are many ways to become involved in building. You can be a contractor, you can be an engineer, you can be an architect. It was only after I had come to the United States that I discovered I had to make a choice. It was not something I had been committed to ever since I was a kid.

HAPR: You are most well-known for modernist works like the East Wing of the National Gallery of Art and, more recently, the Bank of China building in Hong Kong. Have your childhood experiences in China, roaming in classical Chinese gardens in Suzhou, influenced your aesthetic sense and conception of space?

Pei: I think it might have. Yes. Not so obviously in the sense that I started thinking about spaces and volumes with that in mind. No. But what you have learned and experienced in life comes out in a very unplanned way. If you asked me whether the design of the East Wing was inspired by my experiences in Suzhou, I would say no. That is a totally different kind of problem. But regarding the problem of human scale, yes. The scale of buildings I saw as a child was very small. The gardens were also very small, very intricate-the opposite of Versailles. Versailles was a shock to me when I first saw it, much later in life. Chinese gardens are very unusual in the sense that you can create a microcosm of the world in such tiny space. And that has always been in my mind, so that I am never discouraged when I don't have as much room to work with. I can always say, look at the Suzhou gardens and what wonders you can create with them. It is a sense of scale. It is very different.

After coming to America, and having dealt with various problems, I soon found that there is no connection between the two worlds. The Suzhou garden was one experience in my life, and it had nothing to do with what I was going to be here. But it came back, in a most unexpected way. I remember the twists and turns of Chinese gardens, that you never see the end as you do at Versailles. In a Chinese garden, you make a turn, and then you pause, you see something, and you turn again, and you see something different. This concept lingers with me, and I continue to draw from it.

However, the cultural differences between the East and the West are such that there is no way for me to reconcile them. The individual is the most important person in the landscape. Therefore your architecture and your landscape have to consider how he will react, not so much the crowd, the masses.

HAPR: In 1979, you accepted a commission to do a new hotel for the Chinese government at Fragrant Hill. What about that project appealed to you?

Pei: China. I returned to China in 1974, with a group of American architects actually, almost forty years after I left there. It was an entirely new country to me. Mao Zedong had come in. My family garden had become public. I was invited back in 1978 by then Vice Premier Gu Mu, and I gave a talk at Qinghua University. I told the audience that they had to be more sensitive. At that time they were not building anything. Very little construction was going on, except the Beijing Hotel. It was quite tall, and I didn't think it was the right style. They had to think of the overall effect, consider factors such as the Forbidden City. There was something intruding on the traditional harmony. The surrounding environment is terribly important to an architect. I think I made an impression on them. I am very proud of that one. Since then no tall buildings have been allowed within the vicinity of the Forbidden City. I consider this my most important contribution.

They invited me to do a building on Changanjie [Editor's note: Beijing's main thoroughfare, part of which divides the Forbidden City from Tiananmen Square.] I was flattered and said I would consider it. But when they told me that I had to build a very tall building, I became a little less interested. I didn't think it was appropriate. They asked me what would I like to do. I said I wanted to find another site where I could do a building that was more traditional. They offered me several sites to choose from, and I chose Fragrant Hill.

HAPR: What did you want to accomplish with the Fragrant Hill project?

Pei: Maybe it is a little immodest for me to say this but I really wanted to find an alternative to the architecture of Hong Kong and Singapore. I did the OCBC Building in Singapore in the late sixties, but I did not think it was the right style for China. At Fragrant Hill, I wanted to find a new vernacular for China. I visited many cities in China on that trip. The weather was very cold. I revisited my family garden in Suzhou, and I found several things that encouraged me that there was the possibility of a new vernacular. In some ways it was already there. They were built fifty, a hundred years ago, and they were still valid.

Architecture is closely related to life. The life of the people had not changed. In 1978, the life of the people was no different from when I was there. The architecture did not change. Some of them could still be used. So out of that conviction I decided to do the Fragrant Hill. You can find parts of the design that are reminiscent of some of the buildings I saw in Yangzhou and Suzhou.

Of course, life in China has changed a lot since 1978. Would I build the Fragrant Hill the same way today? Perhaps I still would. It has proven to be a success in the sense that many hotels in the provinces have since been built much like the Fragrant Hill, such as Xian's Garden Hotel and Suzhou's Bamboo Grove Hotel.

HAPR: Similar attempts at finding a new vernacular have been made in Iran in the 1960s and Saudi Arabia in the 1970s. What do you think of their efforts?

Pei: Now you are talking about an entirely new lifestyle. You cannot build a building for modern commerce and try to reflect the way people lived in the desert. You can't do that. There are, of course, certain things you can draw from, like the sun. It does not matter if you are living in a tent or a high-rise building, you have to take into consideration the sun. In that sense one could develop a vernacular in that part of the world, but not life itself. Life in the tent cannot be reproduced in Riyadh's modern office buildings. You shouldn't try it. I did not try it in Hong Kong or Singapore. The OCBC Building has nothing to do with the shacks along Singapore River.

HAPR: Why didn't you try to make the Miho Museum of Art in Shiga, Japan more "Japanese?"

Pei: I think Japanese architecture comes out of the landscape much more than Chinese architecture. Not to say that Chinese architecture igores the landscape, but in most cities there is very little nature. They are artifacts just like New York. People, walls, courtyards everywhere. Nature is no longer there. This is not the case in most Japanese cities. Therefore, the relationship between buildings and nature becomes very important. I would like to think that the Miho Museum of Art still bears some affinity to traditional Japanese architecture. The relationship does not come from materials. I used steel; they used wood. I used glass; they used paper. But the relationships of forms, silhouettes, and the mountains were very much inspired by the landscape of Japan. I think you can see some similarities.

HAPR: What kind of preparation went into building the Fragrant Hill?

Pei: Oh, frankly I had to do a lot of soul searching. The Chinese perception of the relationship between nature and building is very different from that of the West. As I said earlier, Versailles and Suzhou gardens have nothing in common. If you ask the Chinese in which they feel more at home, I am sure they will say Suzhou. This relationship between nature and building is still valid.

How to look at nature is also very important. I remember the windows we have in the Suzhou gardens. Sometimes they are in the shape of a vase, sometimes a bamboo bush, sometimes a fan. When we look out from our office windows on Madison Avenue, we want to see all the way to East River. In China, land is not that plentiful; there are so many people there. Gardens need not be very big. They cannot be big and all-encompassing. These windows are more like picture frames. If you go to the Metropolitan Museum here, you will see a replica of one of those gardens. Beyond the window there are some bamboo shoots, and behind the bamboo is a white wall. The distance between the window and the wall is only about five or six feet. I think it creates a very satisfying picture. Out of these ideas, one can begin to search the vernacular. That was how I started.

HAPR: China is a very diverse country, with each region having its distinct character. However, you chose to transport the Suzhou style of the south to the suburbs of Beijing. Why?

Pei: That was something I had some doubts about. It was quite true that the climate of Beijing was different. But the courtyard plan of houses in Beijing was not that different from that of the south. Life still centered around the courtyard. They were all low buildings. In some ways, the differences were not as great as one would think, despite the climate. There were some reservations on my part whether I should paint the walls white. Northerners would be more comfortable with some sort of sand color. In Beijing, dust was a huge problem. A white building, they said, would turn dirty very quickly. But Fragrant Hill was a park. It did not get the kind of dust the city would.

Yes, I have been thinking about this problem a lot since then. The Suzhou style might be a bit of a carry over from my childhood. But that was not something I did not consider. I decided to do it anyway. I could easily have painted the walls in a sand color. It would not have made too much of a difference. In that particular setting, I thought it was quite all right to do the walls in white.

HAPR: At Fragrant Hill the site naturally lends itself to a low-rise building. Can the same kind of cultural synthesis be done in a high-rise building in Shanghai or Beijing?

Pei: The landscape and the surrounding environment are why I chose this site. Along Changanjie you had to build high-rises. Back in 1978, China's infrastructure was extremely limited. You had to concentrate your building in the city core. Building "traditional" high-rises cannot be done because life in the high-rises is completely different from that in traditional Chinese buildings. How can you put computers into a place which is clearly not intended for it? You can try, but you will never be successful. You can put on a traditional Chinese gown. But it becomes almost a caricature in making it "Chinese."

HAPR: Chinese architecture suggests a kind of timelessness. Can this quality reconcile itself with modernity, which emphasizes speed and change?

Pei: Chinese architecture has to change. What I did at Fragrant Hill was partly out of nostalgia and partly time. At that time, China actually stood still. Today, would I do it the same way? I would probably do it differently. I have to consider the changing times, the change in expectations.

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