There is a Latin expression, Finis origine pendet, which translates roughly to, “The end depends on the beginning.” It would seem especially appropriate for I. M. Pei.
At a recent event honoring Pei at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, which he attended from 1942 to 1946, his long-time professional partner Harry Cobb told a resonant story. It seems that when Pei was finishing his degree, he proposed a thesis topic to Walter Gropius, the legendary founder of the Bauhaus, who had taken over the Harvard program in 1937. The thesis was for a museum in a garden to be located in Shanghai, drawing on Pei’s knowledge of traditional Chinese landscape design.
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