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.
