Quotes by I. M. Pei

Contemporary architects tend to impose modernity on something. There is a certain concern for history, but it's not very deep.

A city, far from being a cluster of buildings, is actually a sequence of spaces enclosed and defined by buildings.

Architecture must not do violence to space or its neighbors.

I have a great love for nature. That must have started somewhere down back home, I think, because my family own one of the better known gardens in Soochow, so I played there, and I lived there, and so I must have absorbed something there. So I continue to have a great interest in nature.

The essence of architecture is form and space, and light is the essential element to the key to architectural design, probably more important than anything. Technology and materials are secondary.