Boston is an I. M. Pei City

At a critical point in its evolution, Boston enjoyed a special relationship with I. M. Pei, who passed away last week at the age of 102. It was the locus of his architectural education, the place where he met his business partner, the sites which established him as a cultural icon, and produced both built and unbuilt work that would come to define both this city, and cement his reputation as one of the world’s most evocative architects.

The outlines of Pei’s early years in the Boston area are well known—an undergraduate transfer to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, student and then colleague of Walter Gropius at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, the publishing of his thesis in 1946 in the French journal l’architecture d’aujord’hui, which merged traditional Chinese garden typologies with a highly modernist parti, which would become a signature of Pei’s hand throughout his lengthy career.