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Passage # 44-47    After visiting the Museum of Islamic Art, people can’t seem to get theMuseum out of their mind. There’s nothing revolutionary about the building.But its clean, chiseled forms have a tranquility that distinguishes it in an agethat often seems trapped somewhere between gimmickry and a cloyingnostalgia.   Part of the allure may have to do with I. M. Pei, the museum’s architect. Peireached the height of his popularity decades ago with projects like the EastBuilding of the National Gallery of Art in Washington and the Louvre pyramidin Paris. Since then he has been an enigmatic figure at the periphery of theprofession. His best work has admirers, but it has largely been ignored withinarchitecture’s intellectual circles. At 91 and near the end of a long career, Peiseems to be enjoying the kind of revival accorded to most serious architects ifthey have the luck to live long enough.    But the museum is also notable for its place within a broader effort toreshape the region’s cultural identity. The myriad large-scale civic projects,from a Guggenheim museum that is planned for Abu Dhabi to Education City in Doha — a vast area of new buildings that house outposts of foreignuniversities — are often dismissed in Western circles as superficial fantasies.As the first to reach completion, the Museum of Islamic Art is proof that theboom is not a mirage. The building’s austere, almost primitive forms and thedazzling collections it houses underscore the seriousness of the country’scultural ambition.    Perhaps even more compelling, the design is rooted in an optimisticworldview, — one at odds with the schism between cosmopolitan modernityand backward fundamentalism that has come to define the last few decades inthe Middle East. The ideals it embodies — that the past and the present canco-exist harmoniously — are a throwback to a time when America’s overseasambitions were still cloaked in a progressive agenda.    To Pei, whose self-deprecating charm suggests a certain noblesse oblige, allserious architecture is found somewhere between the extremes of an overlysentimental view of the past and a form of historical amnesia.    “Contemporary architects tend to impose modernity on something,” he saidin an interview. “There is a certain concern for history but it’s not very deep. Iunderstand that time has changed, we have evolved. But I don’t want to forgetthe beginning. A lasting architecture has to have roots.” This moderationshould come as no surprise to those who have followed Pei’s career closely. Peiobtained his fame for the design of the Kennedy Library in Boston in themid-1970s. The library, enclosed behind a towering glass atrium overlookingthe water, was not one of Pei’s most memorable early works, nor was itparticularly innovative, but the link to Kennedy lent him instant glamour.    The building’s pure geometries and muscular trusses seemed at the time tobe the architectural equivalent of the space program. They suggested anenlightened, cultivated Modernism, albeit toned down to serve an educated,well-polished elite. Completed 16 years after the assassination of John F.Kennedy, the library’s construction seemed to be an act of hope, as if thevalues that Kennedy’s generation embodied could be preserved in stone, steeland glass.    In many ways Mr. Pei’s career followed the unraveling of that era, from theeconomic downturn of the 1970s through the hollow victories of the Reaganyears. Yet his work never lost its aura of measured idealism. It reached itshighest expression in the National Gallery of Art’s East Building, a composition of angular stone forms completed in 1978 that remains the mostvisible emblem of modern Washington.    Since that popular triumph Mr. Pei has often seemed to take the kind ofleisurely, slow-paced approach to design that other architects, no matter howwell established, can only dream of. When first approached in 1983 to takepart in a competition to design the addition to the Louvre, he refused, sayingthat he would not submit a preliminary design. President François Mitterrandnevertheless hired him outright. Mr. Pei then asked him if he could takeseveral months to study French history.    “I told him I wanted to learn about his culture,” Pei recalled. “I knew theLouvre well. But I wanted to see more than just architecture. I think heunderstood immediately.” Mr. Pei spent months traveling across Europe andNorth Africa before earnestly beginning work on the final design of the glasspyramids that now anchor the museum’s central court.   In 1990, a year after the project’s completion, he left his firm, handing itsreins over to his partners Harry Cobb and James Ingo Freed so that he couldconcentrate more on design. More recently he has lived in semi-retirement,sometimes working on the fourth floor office of his Sutton Place town house orsketching quietly in a rocking chair in his living room. He rarely takes on morethan a single project at a time.    Such an attitude runs counter to the ever-accelerating pace of the globalage — not to mention our obsession with novelty. But if Mr. Pei’s methodsseem anachronistic, they also offer a gentle resistance to the short-sightednessof so many contemporary cultural undertakings.    Many successful architects today are global nomads, sketching ideas onpaper napkins as they jet from one city to another. In their designs they tendto be more interested in exposing cultural frictions — the clashing of social,political and economic forces that undergird contemporary society — than inoffering visions of harmony.    Mr. Pei, by contrast, imagines history as a smooth continuous process — aview that is deftly embodied by the Islamic Museum, whose clean abstractsurfaces are an echo of both high Modernism and ancient Islamic architecture.Conceived by the Qatari emir and his 26-year-old daughter, Sheikha alMayassa, it is the centerpiece of a larger cultural project whose aim is to forge a cosmopolitan, urban society in a place that not so long ago was a collectionof Bedouin encampments and fishing villages. The aim is to recall a time thatextended from the birth of Islam through the height of the Ottoman Empire,when the Islamic world was a center of scientific experimentation and culturaltolerance.    “My father’s vision was to build a cross-cultural institution,” said Sheikha alMayassa, who has been charged with overseeing the city’s culturaldevelopment, during a recent interview here. “It is to reconnect the historicalthreads that have been broken, and finding peaceful ways to resolve conflict.”    Mr. Pei’s aim was to integrate the values of that earlier era into today’sculture — to capture, as he put it, the “essence of Islamic architecture.”   The museum’s hard, chiseled forms take their inspiration from the ablutionfountain of Ibn Tulun Mosque in Cairo, as well as from fortresses built inTunisia in the eighth and ninth centuries — simple stone structures strongenough to hold their own in the barrenness of the desert landscape. [!--empirenews.page--]
44. According to the article, which of the following items is NOT Pei’s work?
(A) Kennedy Library
(B) National Gallery of Arts in Washington
(C) Louvre Pyramid in Paris
(D) Guggenheim

參考答案

答案：D
難度：適中0.5
統計：A(0),B(0),C(0),D(0),E(0)

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