Building a family legacy

For Pei, the bridge was a "fun little project" among his five-plus decades architectural design experience.

In 1968, he earned a Bachelor of Arts cum laude in Physics from Harvard College and graduated in 1972 from the Harvard Graduate School of Design with a master's degree in architecture.

He spent the first 20 years of his career working with his father, the world-renowned architect I.M.Pei, before founding his own office together with his brother, Li Chung Pei.

Chien Chung Pei has contributed to many of I.M. Pei & Partners' most celebrated projects, including the East Wing of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC and the Louvre Pyramid in Paris. He was also project architect and designer-in-charge for Fragrant Hill Hotel in Beijing and for the expansion of the Mount Sinai Medical Center at the Guggenheim Pavilion in New York.

According to Pu Xiaoyi, representative of Pei China, Chien Chung Pei visited eight cities in three weeks, meeting with clients, colleagues in the construction industry, government officials, and real estate developers, engaging in constructive discussions.

While exploring historical Chinese architecture, he also experienced the rapid development of Chinese architecture in the new era, Pu says.

Chien Chung Pei observed the transformation in China since his last visit, and the multitude of projects that have sprung to life. "People think that during the pandemic, everything stopped in China. It didn't stop. China's never going to stop changing," he says.

For Pu and her colleagues, Chien Chung Pei embodies a persona characterized by precision, humility, knowledge, humor and vitality.

"His work ethic is marked by energy, and he employs scientific reasoning in design, considering a wide array of factors such as geometry, circulation, landscape, materials, green technology, and user psychology," Pu says, adding that Chien Chung Pei's oft-repeated motto is to "solve 10 problems with one gesture".

When he talks to clients, Chien Chung Pei always likes to ask them, "Why?"

"I want to make the building better for them. I don't want it to be my building, I want it to be their building," he explains.

In his mind, his methodology is the same as his father's. "This is something that I learned as a scientist, that you have to have a very rational thinking process. So I think that architecture, like science, is problem-solving," he says. "What I try to do as an architect is to find a new solution to the problem."

He thinks that to solve a problem, an architect needs intuition. "It's based upon what you already know, which really is what the scientific process is all about," he says.

Take his new project in Changsha, Hunan province, as an example. The building's first two floors are a shopping mall, then above that are the apartment buildings.

"I was thinking about that problem, and I said, 'we have to find a way to enter the apartment buildings'," he recalls. He solved the problem with a ramp up to the entrance at the top of the shopping mall. "My intuition told me that I had to find a way to move the lobby up."

Bank headquarters represent a notable segment of his extensive portfolio. Currently, with three projects for the Bank of China under construction, Chien Chung Pei has noticed that the banking business is changing.

"In the United States, the old banks, they always had the big banking hall, which was the most monumental room, because they wanted to impress the clients who walked in. Banks don't work that way anymore," he says.