Perspective: The best way to honor I.M. Pei? Spend some time at the National Gallery of Art.
A view of the National Gallery of Art’s East Building as you emerge from the West Building. By Philip Kennicott Philip Kennicott Art and architecture critic Email Bio Follow Art and architecture critic May 17 at 1:11 PM Washingtonians are fortunate to live with the best of I.M. Pei’s architecture, the East Building of the National Gallery of Art. Opened in 1978, it set an extraordinarily high standard for designing new, modernist additions to traditional, classically styled buildings.
It wasn’t just the odd, quadrilateral shape of the plot that presented difficulties. The addition also had to present a meaningful face to the building it was joining. And this is, for many visitors, the ultimate triumph of the design. When you emerge from the West Building, which was designed and built in the late 1930s, you look across a low, open plaza at the East Building’s mostly symmetrical facade, which looks like an exercise in strict, perspectival drawing.
Pei’s solution to the spatial challenges of the building’s site was a simple, brilliant geometrical insight: He forged two triangles, one with two equal sides and a right triangle . In an early 1968 drawing, made with red crayon and pencil, you see the flash of discovery, the fusion of the two triangles and a bold red arrow pointing into the Fourth Street face of the building, continuing the energy from the West Building into the new space.
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