贝聿铭先生与世长辞，享年102岁

2019年5月16日,贝聿铭先生与世长辞，享年102岁。

In the early 2000s, when I. M. Pei was well into his 80s, he went on a tour of the Middle East to bone up on Islamic architecture before designing one of its major monuments. His mission was to erect a museum that did not yet exist in a city that had recently been built from scratch. He selected a site on an island that had to be made and paid homage to a tradition he didn’t know and a religion with which he had no prior relationship. Somehow all that foreignness produced a late-period masterpiece, the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha, Qatar.

在2000年代早期，当贝聿铭进入他的80岁年代的时候，他在中东旅游，在设计他的一座主要的“纪念碑”之前，认真研究伊斯兰建筑。他的使命是，在一个还没有博物馆的城市，建立一个博物馆，最近是从头开始。他选择了一个岛上的场地，这里必须尊重传统和一个与他没有事先关系的宗教。不知何故，外来性产生了贝聿铭一个后期的杰作，在卡塔尔多哈的伊斯兰艺术博物馆(Museum of Islamic Art )。

Over the course of his career, the aristocrat of American architects, who turns 100 on April 26, has drawn on a dazzling range of influences, from Chinese gardens to ancient Colorado cliff dwellings to the fountain in a Cairo mosque. He blended the austere modernism of the Bauhaus with opulent Beaux-Arts classicism, technological daredevilry with reverence for precedent and a minute study of the past. The best of his creations, like the East Wing of the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., look at once audacious and inevitable. He designed a skyscraper for the Bank of China whose exuberant asymmetry snapped the Hong Kong skyline into focus. Even designs that were never built (an astonishing corkscrew tower intended to rise above the FDR Drive near the Queensboro Bridge) or that wound up bowdlerized (the JFK Presidential Library in Boston) failed with panache.

贝聿铭4月26日满100岁。这个美国建筑师的“贵族”，在他的职业生涯中，设计了许多引人注目的项目——从中国花园到古代的科罗拉多峭壁上的房屋，到开罗清真寺的喷泉。他将豪华的“学院派艺术”(Beaux-Arts)古典主义和包豪斯建筑学派(Bauhaus)简朴的现代主义融合起来，在技术上大胆创新，而又尊重传统。他创作的最好作品，像华盛顿国家美术馆的东楼(Wing of the National Gallery)，看上去大胆而合理。他在香港设计了不对称的中国银行大厦，给人以深刻的印象。贝聿铭还设计了一些从未建设的建筑——例如皇后区大桥附近的一幢螺旋状高楼。他还设计了位于波士顿的肯尼迪总统图书馆(JFK Presidential Library )。

Born a banker’s son in Shanghai, Pei arrived at MIT in 1935 as an engineering student and later attended the Harvard Graduate School of Design. By the time he was done with his studies, the Japanese had gone to war with China and bombed Pearl Harbor. He was not going home anytime soon — not, as it turned out, until 1974. Armored with a light but distinct accent and an air of gentlemanly reserve that would have behooved an English prince, Pei felt at ease around power. He knew how to talk to Jackie Kennedy, Paul Mellon, François Mitterrand, and, early in his career, the hurricanelike New York developer William Zeckendorf.

贝聿铭1917年出生于上海，是一个银行家的儿子。他1935年来到麻省理工学院作为一个工程专业的学生，后来进入了哈佛大学设计学院研究生院。在他完成他的学业的时候，日本向中国开战，并且轰炸珍珠港。他很快就不能回家了，直到1974年才回来。贝聿铭很快适应了异国的生活。他知道如何与杰基-肯尼迪(Jackie Kennedy)、保罗-梅隆(Paul Mellon)、弗朗西斯-密特朗(Francois Mitterrand)交谈。在他职业生涯的早期，他遇到了纽约的飓风般的开发商威廉-齐肯多夫(William Zeckendorf)。

Pei was working as Zeckendorf’s in-house architect in the ’50s, when he designed the affordable-housing complex at Kips Bay Plaza. The immense grids of precast concrete can feel gloomy and even anti-urban in their brooding, repetitive length, but at the time, their muscular minimalism seemed boldly idiosyncratic, a world away from the generic brick boxes of public housing. The project was a triumph of stinginess and practicality, the kind of accomplishment that might have led to a life of frictionless corporate servitude. Even long after he had formed his own firm and been anointed a past master, he still fretted that he might have sacrificed artistry to ingenuity. In 1979, the Times critic Paul Goldberger found him in a reflective mood: “Maybe my early training set me back. Maybe it made me too much of a pragmatist,” he said. He was 62, with three decades and several more masterworks left to round out his career.

贝聿铭在上个世纪50年代，担任齐肯多夫的内部建筑师，当时，他在 基普湾广场(Kips Bay Plaza)设计了一批经济适用房。这些巨大的网格预制混凝土可能让人感到阴郁，其重复的长度甚至是反城市的，但在当时，它们的强壮极简主义似乎很大胆，一些世界上远离一般的“砖盒”的公共住房。该项目是一种吝啬和实用性的胜利，这种成就感，可能会导致无摩擦的团体奴役的生活。即使在他组建了自己的公司并被称为老练者之后，他仍然担心他可能会牺牲艺术性来创造独创性。1979、时代杂志的评论家保罗-戈德伯格(Paul Goldberger)发现他陷入一种沉思：“也许我早期的训练让我回归，也许它使我有太多的实用主义。”他当时是62岁，三十年的时间和几个经典作品丰富了他的职业生涯。

Given Pei’s penchant for elegant solidity, it’s ironic that the project that nearly sank the firm was the Hancock Tower in Boston, a glass edifice so ethereal that clouds seem to glide right through it. Construction of the tower damaged nearby Trinity Church. Then the curtain wall began to crack, and for a while workers patched the broken windows with plywood panels, making the façade look diseased. Finally, an engineer discovered that a strong wind might knock the structure over, and it had to be reinforced with 1,650 extra tons of steel. Pei’s partner Henry Cobb had designed the building, and the tower opened in 1976 to become a Boston landmark, but notoriety clung to the firm.

贝聿铭喜欢优雅的坚固建筑，讽刺的是，这个项目几乎影响了该公司的在波士顿的汉考克大厦(Hancock Tower)项目。这是一幢玻璃建筑。这幢在三一教堂附近的建筑受到损害。当时，幕墙开始裂缝，工人用胶合板修补破碎的窗户，使外观看起来很破旧。最后，一位工程师发现，强风可能会掀翻这幢建筑，它必须用1650多吨钢筋加固。贝聿铭的合伙人亨利-科布(Henry Cobb)设计了这座大楼，1976年初，该大楼正式开放，成为波士顿的标志性建筑，但这家公司却声名狼藉。

Pei managed to wash away the Hancock taint, partly with the East Wing of the National Gallery, which opened in 1978. A pair of nested triangular forms taper to an edge so sharp that visitors get a frisson from stroking it, using it as a gun sight for photos of the distant Capitol. The white H-shaped façade invites visitors into an atrium that balances clarity and complexity, sliced by bridges, hung with a giant Calder mobile, and topped by a spectacularly luminous glass roof. (The East Wing recently reopened after a sensitive renovation.) In the decade-long process from contract to completion, Pei demonstrated his virtuosity with every tool of his profession, navigating tortuous politics, protecting the design’s integrity, and developing a contemporary architectural language that merged formality with warmth.

贝聿铭设法洗去了汉考克大厦的带来的污名，部分原因是他设计的国家美术馆的东楼(East Wing of the National Gallery)在1978年开幕。一对嵌套的三角形的圆锥边缘锋利得让游客抚摸它得到一个战栗，它就像一个对着远处的国会大厦的瞄准器。白色的H型的立面邀请来访者进入一个中庭，并且有一个非常明亮的玻璃屋顶。在从签署合同至完成的10年过程中，贝聿铭使用他的各方面的专业才能，展示了他精湛的技艺，并且妥善处了政治上的问题，保护设计的完整性，发展了当代建筑语言，融合了形式与内在的思想。

He also indulged his penchant for geometric precision, a love that bloomed in his renovation of the Louvre Museum. When France’s President Mitterrand tapped Pei for the project, the architect faced attacks that ranged from stylistic criticism to outright racism: How could a not-French, not-European — not even fully Western! — quasi-modernist dare to tamper with a great (if neglected) icon of national culture? Pei responded with a design that invoked the geometric purity of the 18th-century French architect Étienne-Louis Boullée and also gave Paris a jolt of modernity as bracing as the Eiffel Tower.

贝聿铭还沉迷于几何精度的爱好，在卢浮宫博物馆的整修中体现出来。当时法国总统密特朗(Mitterrand )同意贝聿铭设计这个项目，贝聿铭面临从风格的批评到彻底的种族主义攻击。一个不是法国人，不是欧洲人，甚至不是完全西方人的建筑师——一个准现代主义者敢于“篡改”一个伟大的国家文化图标?贝聿铭用借鉴了十八世纪的法国建筑师艾蒂安-路易斯-布雷(Etienne-Louis Boullee)几何精确风格的设计回应。他还给巴黎如埃菲尔铁塔一样的现代建筑的惊喜。他在U形建筑的中央庭院里新建了一个地下入口，然后用一个水晶金字塔和一三角形水池放在它顶上。

He carved out a new underground entrance in the central court of the U-shaped building, then topped it with a crystal pyramid and a set of triangular pools. The crisp planes embraced by arms of ornate stone, the skin of water reflecting Paris’s turbulent skies, the transparent portal to an underground realm, the stagy staircase that spirals down into the atrium like a long curl of orange peel — all these features now seem so intuitively correct that it’s easy to forget how many experts howled about each one. With the simplest of gestures — albeit one hugely complicated to execute — Pei had transformed a great creaky mess of a museum into a modern palace of blockbuster shows, able to handle multitudes.

这些易脆的平面由装饰华丽的石头围绕，水面反映了巴黎的美丽的天空。透明的入口通向地下。螺旋楼梯下到中庭，像一条长的卷曲橙皮——所有这些设计特色现在似乎很直观地正确，使人很快忘记许多专家对每个部分的挑剔。贝聿铭用最简单的设计语言(尽管实施建设非常复杂)，把一个老旧的博物馆变成了一个令人惊奇的现代宫殿，接纳了成千上万的参观者。

He has been called the wrong man for many different jobs. The architect and critic Michael Sorkin recounts calling Pei in 1987 and half-jokingly demanding that he turn over the task of designing the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland. “What do you know about rock and roll, I. M.?” Sorkin asked. The elder architect politely answered that he knew all about popular music thanks to his son: “T’ing gave me a book!” he explained. That cultivated naïveté has served him well. When the call came from Doha, he responded with the confidence and humility to revisit his education and forge a new style, yet again, in his 80s. A signature, he once said, is a trap. “I don’t envy the architects who have such a strong stylistic stamp that clients would be disappointed if they do not get the same ‘look’ in their projects … I think I have greater freedom.”

他因为许多不同的工作被称为错误的人(wrong man)。建筑师和评论家迈克尔-索尔金(Michael Sorkin)在1987年打电话给贝聿铭，半开玩笑地要求他交出克利夫兰的“摇滚名人堂”(Rock and Roll Hall of Fame)的设计任务。迈克尔-索尔金说：“贝聿铭先生，你对摇滚乐了解多少?”年老的建筑师贝聿铭有礼貌地回答，他知道所有的流行音乐，是由于他的儿子。当他从多哈打来电话的时候，他带着自信和谦逊的态度，重新审视他的教育，开创了一种新的风格。贝聿铭说：“我不羡慕那些有如此强烈的风格印记的建筑师，如果他们在项目中没有得到同样的风格，客户会感到失望……我认为我有更大的自由。”

He trained that freedom on the Museum of Islamic Art, a bleached mirage like a palace of sugar cubes emerging from the Persian Gulf waters into the hard glare of Doha. Like Candide searching for happiness, Pei went hunting for the “essence” of Islamic architecture. He rejected the Great Mosque at Córdoba, the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus, and the Ribat fortress in Tunisia and finally found what he was looking for in the pared-down tranquillity of the Mosque of Ahmad Ibn Tulun in Cairo. There, a round dome on a square chamber in a large arcaded court expressed the nested geometries that had danced through his mind for decades. In the museum he finally designed, the purest distillation of Islamic architecture turns out also to yield the perfect synthesis of the Beaux-Arts polygons and stern modernist orthodoxies he had absorbed as a student in the 1940s; of all the solid, rocklike presences and airy atria he had conjured; of all the deluxe surfaces and liquid light he had ever choreographed. On his way to his centennial, I. M. Pei struck out on a quest through exotic lands and finally found himself.

他在伊斯兰艺术博物馆训练了这种自由，这是一个白色的海市蜃楼，像一个从波斯湾水域冒出的糖的宫殿，进入多哈的强烈的的光线中。像康迪德(Candide )寻找幸福，贝聿铭找到了伊斯兰建筑的精髓。他否定了许多伊斯兰的著名建筑，包括西班牙科尔多瓦的大清真寺(Great Mosque)、大马士革的倭马亚大清真寺(Umayyad Mosque)和突尼斯的里巴堡垒(Ribat)，最终在开罗宁静的伊本-图伦清真寺找到了他需要的东西。这幢典型而独特的伊斯兰建筑的形象，在他的脑海里萦绕了几十年。他最后设计的这个博物馆，将最纯粹的伊斯兰建筑与现代主义完美地结合在一起。贝聿铭在通向他的100周岁的漫长路途中，在异国的土地上努力探索，最终找到了自我.