File photo taken on Dec. 16, 2009 shows world-renowned architect Ieoh Ming Pei attending a dinner event at the Museum of Chinese in America in New York, the United States. Ieoh Ming Pei, commonly known as I.M. Pei, has died at age 102, according to multiple reports on May 16, 2019. Pei was born in Guangzhou of China and moved to the United States in 1935. He won a wide variety of prizes and awards in the field of architecture. (Xinhua/Wang Jiangang)
NEW YORK, May 16 (Xinhua) -- Renowned China-born American architect Ieoh Ming Pei, commonly known as I. M. Pei, died at age 102, several sources confirmed on Thursday.
Pei was born in Guangzhou, China, and raised in Hong Kong and Shanghai, before moving to the United States in 1935. He studied architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University.
Since the 1940s, he has been the mastermind behind a wide variety of famous buildings including the glass pyramid at The Louvre in Paris, the Bank of China skyscraper in Hong Kong, and the John F. Kennedy Memorial Library in Boston, to name just a few.
Pei won the Pritzker Prize, known as the Nobel Prize of architecture, in 1983. In 1988 U.S. President Ronald Reagan honored him with a National Medal of Arts, and President George H.W. Bush awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1992.
