To make a long story more colloquial than necessary, I.M.Pei was born in China in 19whatever, came to the United States to go to some college somewhere, and decided to stick around and become a famous architect. And did. For decades Pei has enjoyed some of the most notorious successes and failures in the field, and done it with natural elegance. I think of him as the Chinese Duke Ellington. He's the premier architectural heavy hitter. And they say he's never without a smile on his face. Always merry and bright, as Henry Miller used to say.

Whatever his personal ability as a Promethian form-giver and a cool diplomat, with a Bond-villain level of suave piping through his admirable bloodstream, Pei's professional output, his big buildings, have unfortunate side effects on the poor plebian devils who are just trying to go pay a parking ticket. Sorry, Mr. Bond. Through the 60's and 70's and 80's Pei's office cranked out blueprints for some of the best (worst) examples of inhumane architecture ever, on the largest possible scale. Pei is charming, capable, artistically accomplished, and he cares a great deal more about geometric solids than he cares about you.

Credentials:

Credentials? Hah! You'll need a comfortable chair and a couple of hours. Pei is more decorated than a Christmas tree. His accumulated honorary degrees weigh an estimated 5.2 times more than he does. Mitterand made him a Chevalier in the Legion d'Honneur, then promoted him to Officier shortly after. Reagan gave him the Medal of Liberty. He's had the AIA Gold Medal, and been given the Medal of Freedom by George Bush I, among many, many others.

His list of buildings includes, well, let's just see, the famous Louvre addition, the NCAR complex in Boulder, the Hancock Tower in Boston, the East Building of the National Gallery of Art, the JFK Library in Boston, the Javits Convention Center, the Dallas City Hall, the Dallas Meyerson Symphony Center and a cadre of other prime museums and stuff around the world. (And, interestingly, Pei got the commission for about 50 FAA airport towers across the US in the early 1970's, all of them ugly as sin.)

Crimes:

Pei has a clear architectural vision and he can get things done, surmounting every obstacle, with a fondness for geometric solids and the big picture.

This broad-stroke, grand-scheme geometry makes sense from heaven, or from a helicopter. From ground level the sense of Pei's work is more like accidental totalitarianism. Some of Pei's work is not only bad at ground level, it's unforgettably and comically bad. And it's been that way since he started.

There's NCAR, there in the grassy foothills of Boulder. The city of Boulder is full of ironies and contradictions, and as if to fulfill some inevitable college-town curse bouncing off the relatively pleasant UC campus, NCAR isn't even a college yet it's got enough 70's-college-campus-concrete brutality to last anybody's lifetime. When you stand there at NCAR, it feels like an original landmark, the first of a long series, a sort of an archetypically unbearable building. I find myself wanting to prevent it.

Stumbling into the oldest quadrangle on the Cornell campus, perched high above Ithaca, only to be confronted with the unbelievably awkward Johnson Museum, dominating its surroundings like a stupefying alien punch-card monster, made me want to burst out laughing.

Things got particularly bad at the Boston John Hancock Center. During construction so many of its glass panels fell out during construction, replaced with plywood panels, that it was dubbed the world's tallest wooden building. Less conspicuous: a $6 million structural reinforcement project done after the building was complete. And there's a major error where it meets the street. High winds created at ground level - strong enough to make human kites of Boston's children - were seen as an acceptable trade-off to maintain the clean artistic integrity of the structure. Dig into the literature and you can actually hear Henry Cobb tell people point-blank, "You don't matter." Eurgh. The John Hancock came close to ending Pei's career.

When I.M. Pei won the commission for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame to be erected on the Cincinnati shoreline in 1995, one of his staff had to take Mr. Pei aside and explain what rock and roll was. Another version of the story has him on a week-long Mississippi roadtrip with Jann Werner looking around the Delta for the soul of the building. (Gosh, sorry I missed it.) To demonstrate his newfound understanding, Pei designed a large glass pyramid there in Cleveland. If you happen to be flying over the RRHF in a helicopter, and you squint, the building might resemble a record player. And there are climate problems.

And that's funny, because Pei's celebrated Louvre Expansion was completed in 1993. In a gesture of respect for the context of the site, a courtyard surrounded by a centuries-old French royal palace and national treasure, the expansion featured a 71-foot glass pyramid there in Paris, three other smaller pyramid skylights ("pyramidons"), and yet another above a commercial space (hidden by a traffic circle on ground level). And there are climate problems.

And that's funny too, because the celebrated East Building of the National Gallery of Art was completed in 1978, and features a cluster of seven glass pyramid skylights there in Washington over the atrium gallery, and that famous acute angle outside. I don't know if there were climate problems, but there are problems looking at the art. The galleries are sort of secondary to the glory of the building.

And all that's funny too, because one of the early plans for the JFK Library had a truncated glass pyramid. I bet you didn't know I.M. Pei was such a pioneer of recycling.

I.M. Pei was awarded the Pritzker Prize in 1983 and carefully placed it in his 30,000 square foot trophy room.