Why Pei?

There were a hundred proposals for memorials to John Kennedy within a week of his assassination, but it soon became clear that the Kennedy Library on the banks of the Charles was to be the nation's principal monument to its 35th President. Kennedy himself had visited Harvard to select a site. The family, along with an advisory committee of artists and architects headed by William Walton, began the process of choosing an architect in the early months of last year.

The first decision was whether to hold a competition for the building. The family decided against it since in a competition "you have to surrender to the judges," as William Walton put it. What they chose, the Kennedys would have to accept, whether they liked it at all or not, by the rules of the game.

With the aid of John Carl Warnecke, the San Francisco architect who was associated with the President, and who was to design his tomb, the family drew up a list of 19 outstanding architects. These men were asked to meet in Boston in April to help direct the choice of an architect for the Library. They were asked to submit photographs of what they considered their best works to Walton, who went over them with Jacqueline Kennedy. "She threw herself into it--she wanted to know whom she was meeting," Walton said.

Walton, who gave up a career as a Life foreign correspondent to make a living as an artist in Washington, had become a close friend of the Kennedys. He worked in the 1960 campaign in West Virginia and at the Convention; afterwards Kennedy appointed him as peacemaker to help unify New York Democrats' reform and Tammany wings for the duration of the campaign. As President, Kennedy made Walton chairman of the Fine Arts Commission, which passes on the plans for all buildings in Washington.

Walton and Mrs. Kennedy were to do most of the work of selecting the architect. Robert Kennedy was busy with his campaign for most of the time the choice was being made, and his brother's injury kept him from participating. Jean Smith, the President's sister, went with Walton and Mrs. Kennedy to meet several of the architects being considered.

The 19 architects who met in Boston were asked to name the men they thought best qualified to design the building. (Walton counted the votes in a hangar at Logan Airport, then did away with the ballots to preserve the secrecy the architects demanded.) They had agreed, with the six foreigners among them vigorously concurring, that the architect should be an American. Almost everyone listed Mies van der Rohe, the German-born septuagenarian who is generally looked upon (along with LeCorbusier and the late Frank Lloyd Wright) as one of the three greatest architects of the 20th century. Most of the selections also included Warnecke, because of his association with the President. There were several votes for a corporation, the giant firm of Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill. These were counted as votes for Gordon Bunshaft, the SOM partner who designed Yale's Beinecke Rare Book Library.

Walton drew up a list of the seven people most often mentioned by the 19 architects. The other four were Paul Rudolph, chairman of Yale's Architecture Department, Estonian-born Louis Kahn, Philip Johnson of Connecticut and Ieoh Ming Pei.

Once again Walton and Mrs. Kennedy went over the elaborate workbooks prepared by the architects, and now they began traveling to meet each of the men they were considering for the job. Louis Kahn, whom Walton remembers as "leprechaunish," drew a plan of a platform stretching across Storrow Drive, with the library to be built atop the platform; Mies van der Rohe suggested a similar concept. Bunshaft, whose Beinecke at Yale was the only libray any of the architects submitted in their workbooks, was considered carefully. (When Walton and Mrs. Kennedy visited Yale to talk with Paul Rudolph they found that three of the seven men had buildings on the campus. None has a building at Harvard.)

One or two of the architects could be eliminated, one on Mrs. Kennedy's own early decision, another because it did not seem that he would be able to work closely with the members of the Kennedy family. But among architects of this calibre, not many could be "eliminated on points." It was a contest of positive, not negative qualifications.

Walton remembered his visit to Ieoh Ming Pei's New York office. Pei went over his works carefully. "He explained how he had developed, what was his high mark and his low in his own estimation. When he showed his last two buildings, I remarked that each seemed to be quite a great step forward. He looked at me and said, 'Yes, but I feel that I am on the verge of my greatest work.' Mrs. Kennedy almost gave him the job right then and there."

Pei had very obvious qualifications. Of all the architects, he had the most experience in city planning, and the Kennedy Library will be an immense city planning project. (It has been estimated that five million people a year may come to the library in the first few years. Consider the effect of that little increase in Harvard Square traffic. Or consider the parking problem.) Again, he has experience in Cambridge--he designed the Cecil and Ida Green Building, Center for the Earth Sciences, which towers over M.I.T.

Pei was born in 1917, the same year as John Kennedy (another factor the family considered--many of the architects were not of the same generation as the President) in Canton, China. He decided to become an architect when he saw his first skyscraper at the age of 16, came to the United States two years later, graduated from M.I.T., and got his master's at Harvard, where he served on the Faculty from 1945 to 1948. He was also a member of the Visiting Committee of the School of Design for five years.

Pei's career has been outstanding, particularly for a man of his age, though Walton agreed that there are men of greater eminence in American architecture. "We weren't running a kind of contest for the greatest architect in America," he explained. "We wanted the man who would do best by this one building. It isn't as though we'd picked an unknown, but the choice was a gamble of sorts, a hedged gamble. The hedge, of course, is the work he's already done."

Much of that work was done for William Zeckendorf's Webb and Knapp firm. In 1955 Pei founded his own firm, I. M. Pei and Associates. A great deal of his early work was in city planning, but the two buildings that impressed Walton and Mrs. Kennedy were a weather research station set against the mountains in Boulder, Colo., and the Newhouse Communications Center in Syracuse, N.Y.

Critics of the choice call Pei a "safe" architect, but one who has not displayed great creativity. But Walton feels differently. "He isn't the easy choice," he said. "He isn't a fashionable architect, he wasn't the best known, and he doesn't work for one of the big corporations. He's a guy who worked his own way up. I don't know what he'll do, but it will be an exciting building."