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There is a world of difference between the two Chinese-born architects who have won the Pritzker Prize. 1988 winner Ieoh Ming Pei left China as a teenager for studies in the U8, graduating directly into a dozen-year spell as in-house designer for prominent New York developer William Zeckendorf. Accordingly, Pei's work is corporate in character (leavened by loss-leading cultural complexée) and only rarely, and almost guiltily, Chinese. The 2011 Pritzker Prize went to Wang Shu - whose work is tactile, handshaped, at times surreally idiosyncratic, but also linked to Chinese traditions in ways the roots-seeking Pei never understood. Shu's Pritzker win can only be read as a pointed rejoinder to Pei's cohort of global corporate firms.
Pei should ultimately join his former teacher Walter Gropius near the front of the long line of most over-praised architects of the 20th century. But he is important for other reasons: crucially, as the first non-Western architect to rise to the peaks of the global profession. That ascent is worth examining, because it says much about both the profession, and this architect's managerial acumen - his major legacy.
Pei's father was manager of the Bank of China's Canton branch when the Chinese civil war broke out (forcing him to bundle the twoyear-old Ieoh Ming off to refuge in Hong Kong); he returned later to Shanghai when things stabilised and rose to govern the country's key bank. The father was distant and imperious, a style the architect adopted more than he might have wished - he was known as ??' to even the closest of associates, and his office often featured no chairs other than the senior partners'.
Pei was Mandarin-born to China's moneyed class, but barely a dozen years after his 1935 American arrival he had achieved an equal cultural status as a Boston Brahmin, followed by his ultimate triumph as a Mover and Shaker of big business in...