I.M. Pei and the National Gallery

The purpose of this research is to examine the east wing of the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., designed by architect I.M. Pei in the late 1970s. The plan of the research will be to set forth a description of the life and career of Pei and of the National Gallery itself, and then to discuss reasons for the new addition, how the commission to design the east wing of the structure came about, and details of the project itself, from an architectural standpoint. As well, reference will be made to the relationship between the "container," or structure, and the "contents," or works of art that it houses.

To discuss a principal work of Ieoh Ming Pei, usually referred to as I.M. Pei, it is useful to place that work in the context of life. Pei was born into a financier's family in 1917 in Canton, China, and stayed in the United States from 1935 onward, when he came to the country to study architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He received his degree in 1939, worked as an architect until 1942, when he joined the National Defense Research Committee at Princeton. After World War II, Pei taught at Harvard's Graduate School of Design for three years, returning to private-sector architecture in 1948 at a major New York real estate company owned by William Zeckendorf Sr. that was involved in city planning and commercial and residential real estate development. As an architectural director for the real estate firm, Pei participated in major commercial and re

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countries a wide variety of exquisite art for temporary exhibitions and oversaw state-of-the-art procedures for the felicitous display of art. One of his finest accomplishments was serving as the guiding light behind the construction of the museum's stunning East Wing designed by I. M. Pei (White, 1992, p. C8) A decisive commitment to modernism as an aesthetic architectural statement is consistent with a commitment to the seriousness and importance of 20th-century art as a part of the aesthetic culture more generally. This is evident in the documented reaction to the completion of the building, described by Huxtable and Kramer (1978, p. 58), as "a capital art palace" and by Glueck (1978, p. D1) as a "bold new showcase for modern art." To be sure, not all reactions to the East Wing were positive when it was initially completed; however, the selfconscious commitment to modernism was evident in both the choice of architect and the selection of works of art (e.g., by Rothko and Motherwell) to be displayed in the Wing's inaugural year (McLanathan & Brown, 1978). What makes the East Wing "stunning"--whether the assessment of the structure itself is positive or negative--can be seen in an examination of the project itself. The co

Category: Arts - I