The essence of architecture is form and space, and light is the essential element to the key to architectural design, probably more important than anything. Technology and materials are secondary.
I. M. Pei
We had a lot of difficulty in getting the French to accept the pyramid. They thought we were trying to import a piece of Egypt until I pointed out that their obelisk was also from Egypt and the Place des Pyramides is around the corner. Then they accepted it. The pyramid at the Louvre, though, is just the tip.
The Louvre for me is a wonderful experience. Because it continues; it didn't get cut off. It was actually a continuous involvement all the way, and a lot of people have come and gone, come and gone; but I'm still here.
To me, form doesn't always follow function. Form has a life of its own, and at times, it may be the motivating force in design. When you're dealing with form as a sculptor, you feel that you are quite free in attempting to mould and shape things you want to do, but in architecture, it's much more difficult because it has to have a function.
I've never left China. My family's been there for 600 years. But my architecture is not consciously Chinese in any sense. I'm a western architect.
A lasting architecture has to have roots.
I liked the America of Bing Crosby, Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton - it was all a dream, of course, but a very alluring dream for a young man from Canton.
In northern architecture - the cathedrals of Europe and all the little churches - the details, the carving of stone, become necessary because the light is not there to help you very much. You have to enrich surfaces. The desert reduces form to its simplest nature. There is no need for gargoyles or flying buttresses in the desert.
I came, I studied architecture in America, so my technical background's completely western. But my seventeen years, the formative years of one's life, and I can't say that the Chineseness in me is not there.
Contemporary architects tend to impose modernity on something. There is a certain concern for history, but it's not very deep.
I have a great love for nature. That must have started somewhere down back home, I think, because my family own one of the better known gardens in Soochow, so I played there, and I lived there, and so I must have absorbed something there. So I continue to have a great interest in nature.
One thing I learn - I've been in practice now for half a century or more, and the most important ingredient for an architect to do a good building is to have a good client. I think a client counts for as much as fifty per cent.
I'd been going to the Louvre since 1951. I thought I knew Paris and the French, but I didn't really. You know how easy it is to make friends when you are traveling. People are curious about you, you are curious about them. But you never really make friends that way. After the Louvre, I discovered that I have friends now because I have enemies.
Even a beautiful piece of work can be overshadowed, destroyed, by something else.
Modern architecture needed to be part of an evolutionary, not a revolutionary, process.
The Pyramids are perfect, but you can't put the Pyramids in the middle of Manhattan. In the desert, the combination of light and form makes it perfect.
I arrived in the U.S.A. in 1935, to San Francisco. I got the boat from China, and I didn't even speak English. I could read a little, perhaps write a little, but that was all. It was a 17-day journey, and I learnt to speak English from the stewards.
It is good to learn from the ancients. I'm a bit of an ancient myself. They had a lot of time to think about architecture and landscape.
A city, far from being a cluster of buildings, is actually a sequence of spaces enclosed and defined by buildings.
Architecture must not do violence to space or its neighbors.
The first decent building I did with my own practice was a chapel in Taiwan.
I think the artistic side of architecture was natural to me. My mother was an artist and a poet.
