Leoh Ming Pei & Eero Saarinen

The architects that I am comparing came from two different parts of the world and yet, in some ways the message(s) behind their work and the incorporation of engineering, geometrical and sculptural elements into their designs and their new identity as “Americans” brings them closer together.


Leoh Ming Pei was born in Canton, China in 1917 and came to the United States for his further education. Because of his fathers influence on him, who always encouraged Pei in designing, he attended MIT and it was finally in Harvard that he got his architectural degree.   Being brought up in a different culture also had an impact in his design for his approach towards it was different from most of his American classmates whose approaches towards design were mostly very traditional. At Harvard, Le Corbussier’s “Expressive Modernism” influenced him in his use of simple geometric shapes and forms.   Gropius also had a great deal of influence on Pei for he developed a reliance on abstract form and materials such as stone, concrete, glass and steel and later developed his own approach to design in which he exhibits interest in the Avant Garde. My next architect is (1910- 1961) who was born in Finland, a son of an architect father and a sculptor and architectural model-maker mother. His parents’ professions influenced him very much into being an architect and he enrolled in Cranbrok Institute of Architecture and also Yale University after his family moved to the United States. He also went to Europe for a year to study sculpture and over there, he was greatly influenced by the sculptors there of that time and this sculptural influence is seen in almost every one of his designs. Like Pei, he was also a first generation American and having being brought up in a different country also had a great impact on the way he looked at design and his concepts towards it. After he finished his architectural degree, he developed a theory of treating architecture as sculpture, an engineering...