I.M. Pei: Is Luck the Residue of Design?

"I suppose the choice was a little unorthodox. After all, some of the others were much better known. All those we considered are fine architects. But Pei! He loves things to be beautiful.... We felt that Pei's best work, as John Kennedy's was in 1960, is yet to come." Ieoh Ming Pei was a modest, low-key 48-year-old architect when Jacqueline Kennedy gave that short speech in December of 1964. A Chinese-born American architect, schooled at MIT and the Harvard Graduate School of Design, Pei had been the surprise winner in the world-wide architectural talent search for the Kennedy Library project architect.

A decade has passed since Pei began working on the Library, but for many reasons the architect's work has hardly progressed past this press conference dialogue which Pei engaged in soon after receiving the Kennedy endorsement:

Q. Mr. Pei, can you tell us what the new Kennedy Library will look like?

A. No. All I have is a blank piece of paper.

Q. There's nothing on that piece of paper?

A. Nothing at all.

But Pei will have to have this blank piece of paper filled by June 3, the date set for the release of the new Kennedy Library plans. The designer has repeatedly had to scale down and even scrap many of his original plans to appease local civic and architectural leaders who fear environmental damage to the Cambridge-area community.

Still, the 10-year Kennedy quagmire has not kept Pei from progress on other fronts, from doing what he is supposed to do best: making cities a better place to live in. The prolific architect and his staff of 110 have won wide acclaim for creating or renovating buildings in almost every large American city, including his heavily-decorated Kipps Bay Plaza and Bedford-Stuveysant Superblock in New York and his Society Hill Towers in Philadelphia.

Pei has earned his reputation in urban design not for crafting architectural prima donnas, but for building what he has called "good neighbors," edifices which easily fit into the scheme of the city. Pei, in a 1971 Business Week interview, said he believes that "A city, far from being a cluster of buildings, is actually a sequence of spaces enclosed and defined by buildings." The architect has said that he refuses to compromise or ignore the residents in his designs. In a Time interview in 1964, shortly after receiving work of the Kennedy project, Pei proclaimed that "architecture must not do violence to space or its neighbors."

But while Pei has been busy being a good neighbor in many American cities, his buildings in Boston have been having trouble making friends. Diagnosed euphemistically, Pei's problem may be what Back Bay Association president Daniel J. Ahern has called "the inevitable problems that everyone runs into when they build on Boston's weak foundations," or it may be a native reaction against disturbing Boston's more sedate areas, or possible it is plain bad luck. Whatever the reason, the New York-based architect has not had an easy time in Boston. And his hard times in the Hub have raised questions about both Pei's architectural supervision of his projects and his sensitivity to community desires.

Pei's troubles began in 1964, shortly after completing the Green Center for the Earth Sciences at MIT. The $5-million project worked fine, until students tried to get inside. Air pressure from wind whipping around the bottom floor of the building sealed the doors shut, and they had to be replaced with revolving doors at a cost of $60,000. Ann Landreth, public relations representative for Pei and Partners, explains that the building design was a common one, but that this wind-tunnel phenomenon "had never happened before."

Then there are the Boston Harbor Towers, a Pei project completed in 1973. In an April Esquire Magazine article, Gerry Nadel wrote that the high-rent tenants in the towers "are moaning about thin walls and loose plumbing." But Landreth claims that Pei and Partners "did only schematic drawings for the apartments, and not the interior." Nevertheless, Pei, as the architectural supervisor for the project, can't be completely exonerated for the faults inside the apartment.

But Back Bay expert Ahern, a collaborator with Pei on the Harbor Towers Project, voices a different, aesthetic concern about the buildings: "The towers are ponderous, lifeless, and uninspiring. They are just big tons of concrete, and really don't fit in."

Pei proclaimed that "architecture must not do violence to space or its neighbors."

And then there were the problems Pei encountered with the Christian Science Center. Pei put his classically-oriented partner, Aldo Cussutta--who has since left the firm and moved upstairs from Pei's ninth floor domain at 600 Madison Ave.--as the head of the design team. Although Cussatta "quite typically began examining the potentials of this project in the broadest urban contexts," according to a March 1973 Architecture Plus article, and though the sprawling center was in perfect harmony with Pei's clients, the building's neighbors and the site's original occupants weren't too happy about leaving to make room for the site.

Pei's biggest headache in Boston is undoubtedly the John Hancock Tower, however. It seems that everybody has their own favorite anecdote about this 60-story building with its cascading windows. Yet the matter of the falling glass has tended to obscure the initial argument which Pei encountered when he was commissioned to design a home office headquarters for the New England life insurance firm in 1965.

The original dispute concerning the Hancock Tower was the size of the building itself. As soon as Pei announced the project in 1967, community and architectural leaders swooped down upon the plan and condemned it as 1.6 million square feet of blight on the serene and intimate Copley Square.

The opposing architects, led by the Boston Society of Architects (BSA), a chapter of the American Institute of Architects, claimed that Hancock's request "to increase the floor-area ratio by nearly three times that provided in the zoning ordinance, is such a flagrant breach of the existing regulations that it would make zoning meaningless as a way of regulating land use in the public interest." The architects, in a somewhat foreboding note, also criticized the Pei designers for attempting "to reduce the apparent bulk of their proposal by cladding it in mirrors. This is a device untried on any scale in an urban setting," they warned, "and it may produce unforeseen problems, of appearance, reflected heat and glare."

Pei has earned his reputation in urban design not for crafting architectural prima donnas, but for building what he has called "good neighbors," which easily fit into the scheme of the city.

The BSA voiced its disapproval of the plans after studying the proposal and meeting with Hancock architects, Pei and his general partner Henry Cobb, his chief designer for the Hancock project. The architect group urged that the Boston Board of Appeals deny Hancock's petition for zoning variance until the insurance firm could come up with a "modified" plan better suited for the character of Copley Square. The BSA feared that the building would interrupt the serene pattern of the neighboring Trinity Church and the Florentine Boston Public Library.

After holding hearings to determine if the proposed development conformed with the master plan of the city, and was in accord with the neighbors, the Hancock people finally got Pei's design okayed, in September 1968. But it was only after ten months of wrangling and a change in the zoning law that Hancock got its way.

A spokesman for the BSA said shortly after the zoning law passage that "the overall project does not recognize human values," yet he still allowed that "the Pei planners did the best they could in light of their clients' insistence on the tower and other requirements."

But Jack Feeley, director of public information for Hancock, said last week that his firm had told Pei only "to create a site that would accomodate space needs and have aesthetic qualities at the same time." And architect Henry Cobb, in Nadel's Esquire article, said he decided himself that since the building "had to be tall, near the size of the Prudential Building...if you're going to be near the size of the Prudential, it's better to be taller, than shorter."

So, contrary to what the BSA had previously suggested, it was Pei and Partners which, driven by a competitive urge, wanted the building so huge as to risk zoning violations and Copley Square residents' protests.

Pei, in a 1970 Business Week story, said that when the soaring Prudential building was erected several blocks away from the Hancock site in 1967, the architectural "form" of the area was already destroyed. "Besides it wasn't a great space, like, say, the Place Vendome," Pei said. "Let's forget about the past as far as Copley Square is concerned and try to make a 20th-century space. We know it can be done. Look at Rockefeller Center."

And that is just what Cobb set out to do. In constructing the rhomboid building, the Pei partner created a building that seems inoffensive and one-dimensional from all sides. One of the men who examined the original plans, Ahern, said that the models "looked like a piece of wood covered with cigar wrappers. It looked pretty bad in the model but once built with those reflecting windows, it looked pretty vibrant and exciting." Rick Heym, president of Enviro-Design Group in Cambridge, also said that the bulding was deceptive on paper. "It looked like it would be inappropriate for the neighborhood. It gave the impression that it would be a bad neighbor, but it really is an excellent one, because it looks like it isn't there," Heym said.

But everything changed once the construction began. First, because Back Bay is all reclaimed land from the Charles River Basin, the excavation disturbed the adjacent area. Disrupted sidewalks and streets shifted and buckled, causing damages to sewage and water mains and communication lines. The city of Boston and three utility companies are currently suing Hancock for the damages incurred from this excavation.

Historic Trinity Church also received extensive damages because of the flow of mud beneath its wooden foundations. The Hancock company agreed to pay for the repairs. Various construction accidents, including a broken stained-glass window and a damaged roof, caused one enraged Trinity parishioner to comment to Time, "First they overwhelm us. Now they are trying to destroy us."

The final blows to Pei's beleaguered tower occurred intermittently during the summer of 1972, and increasingly through the winter, when the double-paned glass cracked in 3500 of 10,344 windows, some falling out of the window frames. Although this problem is not a rare occurrence--Pei's office claims that other buildings have had similar problems, without the publicity--the agony was compounded when the Hancock building replaced the broken windows with plywood sheets painted with a black fire retardant requested by the city fire inspectors.

As far as who is to blame--neither Pei nor Hancock is talking. But someone will have to pay the $7 million it will cost to replace the windows. The reflection glass, and the window company, Libby-Owens-Ford, could be at fault--the use of reflective mirror-like glass might have caused the heat stress that the BSA had originally warned the designers about. But as architectural supervisor for the building, Pei and Partners again can't be totally free from blame. And it is possible that Pei and Partners might have designed a building without the materials existing to make its concept work.

Nevertheless, the blackened plywood does spoil the effect of disguising the building amidst its surroundings. All Hancock can do now is wait until September 1974, when all the new single-paned reflective windows are installed, to see whether the effect will still be the same.

But once the building is occupied, Ahern warns that the functional impact of the building will then surface. "It will be fine aesthetically and economically, bringing workers into the city, but the building will present a transportation problem." Ahern cites increasing traffic, plus an overburdened transit system as possible outgrowths of the Hancock Tower occupancy.

The question the Hancock building poses about Pei is whether sensitivity to community desires has a high priority when his plans come under attack and the possibility of his withdrawal from a project arises.

Landreth said last week that Pei "would absolutely withdraw if he thought a building was detrimental to the urban environment." "Mr. Pei takes great pains going into the neighborhood and interviewing people being dislocated and anybody who is touched financially," Landreth said. "All the data is then poured into a big central vat, before we consider the design we work on."

Of all of Pei's projects, the biggest test for his ethics so far will no doubt be the Kennedy Library. The Library plans, unveiled in May 1973, have engendered more protest than any of Pei's projects in Boston to date. The prevailing criticism coming from both the community and architectural leaders ranges from the argument that the modern design would not fit into its surroundings, to the contention that the community could not handle the immense parking problems that the Library would cause in the area. The plan has already gone through many changes to meet with community zoning problems. "Mr. Pei wants it within the texture of the city so everybody's happy," Landreth says. But despite Pei's attempts to scale it down, according to a poll taken last month, about 69 per cent of the community is still opposed to having the combined library and museum proposal built at the old MBTA trolley barn.

From the beginning, the project's chief proponent, Jacqueline Kennedy, has desired the Library to be exciting for young people, and a melting pot for all of Boston's as well as Harvard's students. The melting-pot idea has tarnished a bit, with the Library's tourist-attraction aura toned down, but there is still enough of a potential traffic problem to warrant the environmental study and the crowd estimates.

If Pei's new plans, to be revealed on June 3, are opposed by an overwhelming majority of the community and are found to be environmentally damaging by the impact studies, then Pei could either withdraw entirely from the project or retire to his drawing board for another year of reconsideration.

But if the impact studies find no overwhelming obstacles in the new plans, despite still vehement community opposition, what will Pei do? Despite Pei's office's claims that he would withdraw from a client's project if he thought it was detrimental, Pei would probably follow the precedent he established with the John Hancock Tower and build the library anyway on top of community and architectural opposition.

One can only hope that if Pei gets the go-ahead, his record of "bad luck" in Boston won't follow him when he supervises the execution of the Library plans.