3.2 I.M. Pei and the Third Way of Modernity
















If Liang Sicheng gave us a grammar of tradition, I.M. Pei offered a new syntax—one that flowed not from inherited structures, but from lived contradictions.

Born in Suzhou in 1917, Pei spent his childhood wandering the gardens of Lion Grove, internalising a spatial language defined not by monumentality, but by rhythm, pause, and quiet narrative. At seventeen, he left China for the United States, where he studied at MIT and later at Harvard under Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer. There, he was baptised in modernism’s rational clarity and material discipline—an education that placed him at the very heart of the International Style’s ascendance.

And yet, Pei never fully belonged to either world. He was neither wholly Western nor simply Chinese. His modernism was tempered by memory, and his memory shaped by exile. In his own words, he often searched for “a third way”—a synthesis that could reconcile tradition and innovation, context and abstraction, without reducing either to stereotype.

That search would take on new urgency in the 1970s.

In 1974, Pei joined a delegation from the American Institute of Architects on a historic visit to China—his first return since leaving nearly four decades earlier. The nation he re-entered was no longer the one he had known. Ravaged by political purges and ideological rigidity, it was only just beginning to reopen to the world. And yet, amidst the ruins of cultural amnesia, Pei was invited to design a project: a state guesthouse nestled at the foot of Fragrant Hills (Xiangshan) in Beijing.

It became a turning point—not only in Pei’s career, but in the story of Chinese modernity.

Xiangshan Hotel, completed in 1982, was no mere building—it was a proposition. In a political climate still recovering from ideological trauma, Pei sidestepped the language of form and turned instead to the language of space. Rather than quote traditional symbols—brackets, dougong, tile eaves—he invoked their spatial logic: enclosure and release, framed views, layered thresholds. The result was not a Chinese pastiche draped in modern materials, but a spatial narrative that whispered of Suzhou gardens and Confucian axiality without ever naming them.

The central atrium, bathed in filtered light, recalled the Lion Grove of his youth. Circulation paths meandered like garden strolls, with shifting perspectives unfolding gently, resisting spectacle. At times, the sequence of space even evoked the landscapes of Southern Song scrolls—fluid, layered, and full of metaphor. Pei’s use of concrete was honest, almost ascetic, yet modulated by wood screens, stone textures, and a careful choreography of light and shadow. “The form is modern,” he later explained, “but the spirit is deeply Chinese.”

This, perhaps, was Pei’s most radical move: to define Chineseness not through ornament, but through spatial ethos.

Architectural critics soon recognised the subtlety of this gesture. An article in Architectural Journal hailed the project as a breakthrough—“while most architects are still exploring the traditional modernisation based on external forms, Pei reorients the discussion to spatial relationships as the dominant legacy of Chinese tradition.” In doing so, he reframed the conversation: modernity was no longer a question of visual identity, but of phenomenological continuity.

Pei’s approach stood in contrast to the emerging trends of the time. Many architects, eager to reclaim national identity after decades of suppression, resorted to literal revival—dragging traditional roofs onto concrete slabs, or pasting red columns onto steel frames. These “symbolic restorations” often resulted in hollow hybridities: neither fully modern nor authentically traditional. Pei’s refusal to decorate, to pander to either nationalism or nostalgia, was an act of architectural integrity.

But it was not without tension.

Some critics questioned whether his abstraction was too subtle—too easily misunderstood in a nation still rediscovering its cultural vocabulary. Others felt that his detached internationalism risked estrangement. Yet for a generation of younger architects, Xiangshan Hotel opened a new path: one that neither rejected tradition nor fetishised it, but translated it—quietly, rigorously, and poetically.

In the decades that followed, Pei’s influence continued to echo. His Suzhou Museum (2006) would revisit many of the same themes with greater clarity and confidence: light wells filtered through lattice; floating white walls framed by dark grey tile; a balance of stillness and narrative. If Xiangshan was a tentative first phrase, Suzhou was a full stanza.

Looking back, one sees in Pei not only an architect, but a mediator—between cultures, between ideologies, between epochs. His work reminds us that architectural modernity need not be a rupture. It can be, at its best, a continuity reimagined.

And in that reimagining, lies a form of resistance.