Unearthing I. M. Pei’s Unbuilt Projects

I. M. Pei, while known for his prolific portfolio of architectural icons, has designed many buildings that for various reasons were never realised. A reality for practising architects, unbuilt projects often contain the seeds of ideas that germinate in the building commissions to come. Whether it is the sensitivity of Paris’s historical axis in La Defense that later becomes a defining force in Pei’s design of the Grand Louvre, or the glass and steel exoskeleton structure that appears in the Hyperboloid and the Polaroid Tower, by unearthing several unbuilt projects by Pei’s firm, we can see how design concepts originating in one unexecuted proposal are sometimes revisited and refined in later projects.

The archival footprints of the unbuilt projects featured in the Special Exhibition I. M. Pei: Life Is Architecture—many publicly displayed for the first time—reveal the threads in the way Pei thought about architectural design throughout different stages of his career and more broadly unveil an insistence towards structural innovation and his view of buildings as part of an urban organism. In Pei’s case and beyond, unbuilt projects equally highlight their progress and development and elements of continuity in architects’ design sensibility as they manifest across various projects and over time.

1. Huatung University, Shanghai (1946–1948)

The February 1950 issue of L’architecture d’aujourd’hui features Huatung University in Shanghai, designed by The Architects Collaborative (TAC)—a firm co-founded by Walter Gropius in 1945—with Pei as an associate. The project was commissioned in 1946 by the United Board for Christian Colleges in China (UBCCC), the organisation behind St John’s Middle School, Pei’s alma mater in Shanghai. Gropius invited Pei, who was then an assistant professor at the GSD, to collaborate on the project. Pei remained involved with the project until the UBCCC suspended all work in mainland China following the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949.

The design for Huatung University was neither an imitation of an extinct tradition nor a wholesale importation of a Euro-American style. The interweaving of structures on stilts over bodies of water in landscaped gardens was an economical, functional, and culturally sensitive response to campus life that also reflected the intimacy with the natural environment characteristic of traditional Chinese landscape designs. While the structures are orthogonally planned and built with modern materials, the project’s formal and spatial solutions are grounded in tradition.

Low-lying academic buildings and dormitories spread across the campus are designed at the scale of the human body, with the width of a building encompassing the size of a single classroom and an external corridor. Sloped tiled roofs, covered corridors, courtyard gardens, and glass and reinforced-concrete columns that function as partitions between indoors and outdoors emphasis harmony with nature and facilitate natural cooling in the hot, humid summers.

2. Helix, New York (1948–1949)

Pei’s unbuilt Helix tower is made up of wedge-shaped apartments, stacked in a split-level spiral arrangement to produce a cylindrical volume reaching twenty-one storeys. While load-bearing walls between apartments are vertically aligned across floors, adjacent units are staggered by half a floor such that they can be adjoined diagonally to form duplexes or limitless larger configurations. This system would allow tenants to expand or contract their apartments as desired, introducing a fundamental flexibility in living space.

In the Helix’s plan, Pei concentrated the building’s utilities in the middle to create flexible living spaces. A slim circulation core houses the elevator and stairs and opens outwards onto looped corridors, with each floor containing four apartments. The area devoted to kitchens and bathrooms forms a mechanical ring in the building, centralising all utilities. The main living space extends seven and a half metres to the outermost perimeter of private balconies, amounting to more than seventy-four square metres for each apartment.

3. Hyperboloid, New York (1954–1955)

The Hyperboloid was Pei’s first skyscraper design. A 108-storey tower meant to be part of a new transportation centre and green space on Park Avenue, it would have been the world’s largest office building. Its construction would have necessitated the reconfiguration of traffic flow along curved viaducts, as well as the demolition of Grand Central Terminal. Robert R. Young, chairman of the close-to-bankrupt New York Central Railroad, saw this radical redevelopment as essential to the survival of the railroad industry in the context of the post-war boom. The Hyperboloid project was abandoned following Young’s death in 1958.

When he was invited to envision a new building that would make use of the air rights above new York’s Grand Central Terminal and breathe life into an ailing rail industry, Pei proposed the Hyperboloid. As its name suggests, 456-metre-high project was a three-dimensional closed hyperbolic paraboloid with a central core of vertical columns surrounding elevator shafts, corridors, and circulation, and exterior inclined columns intersecting to form a diagonally latticed shell. The efficiency of its braced perimeter tube structure meant that the Hyperboloid could have been built with the same amount of steel as was used in the Empire State Building—a tower 80 per cent its size—and would have had stronger resistance to lateral wind loads. Pei’s scheme represented a revolutionary use of the hyperboloid, a structural form that until then had only been applied to open-framed latticed infrastructural towers and long-span, thin-shell concrete structures.

4. Polaroid Tower, Cambridge, Massachusetts (1969)

Pei conceived of this forty-five-storey high-rise as the Polaroid Corporation's new headquarters, part of a technology hub called Kendall Square near MIT. The design relies on an exterior bracing structure reminiscent of the unbuilt Hyperboloid, combining steel members horizontally and diagonally in a mega-truss system. Presented with glass behind the lattice-bracing found in such structures as gas storage tanks, thin floor plates extend from the perimeter to a central core between column-free interiors. The latticed exoskeleton departs from standard building practices of the 1960s and presents an honest expression of the building’s structural system.

5. Tête de la Défense, Paris (1970–1971)

In the late 1960s, a decade before his involvement with the Grand Louvre, Pei had designed the Tête de la Défense, an office tower in business district of Paris. The Tête de la Défense was a pivot point in Pei’s career, forming what the architect would later be best known for. The large office tower at La Défense would serve as an end point of the city’s grand historical axis extending from the Louvre through the Place de la Concorde and the Place de l’Étoile. In addition to wanting to preserve Paris’s historic sightlines, Pei approached the project as a finely grained problem of urban design, examining questions of access, vehicular circulation, and infrastructure in the new business district. He proposed two towers that curve towards each other at the base, calculated to reach 189 metres in height, so as not to obstruct views through the Arc de Triomphe.

Araldo Cossutta’s later iterations of the scheme connected Pei’s two towers to form a parabolic structure while accentuating the civic square that extends from underneath the complex. Ultimately, neither proposal was selected by the project’s commissioners. The Tête de la Défense ultimately was not realised until 1989 by Danish architect Johan Otto von Spreckelsen’s the Grande Arche de la Défense.

6. Marina South Development Plan, Singapore (1982–1983)

Pei’s office was selective in taking on planning projects owing to their indefinite outcomes. It accepted the Marina South Development Study project on the condition that it was solely commissioned to the firm. The Singapore Cabinet, however, required an alternative proposal, which led to a similar commission being given to Kenzo Tange. Tange’s radial plan, which matched the curve of a highway, differed from Pei’s rectilinear grid. Pei’s plan was preferred as its rectilinearity could seamlessly integrate the old CBD’s grid pattern with the new city centre. Despite many changes, Pei’s project laid the groundwork for the eventual master plan, which proved influential in shaping an economically viable and visually arresting Marina Bay.