Li Chung (Sandi) Pei: Working with him was quite a wonderful experience because he gave you a lot of freedom to succeed or to fail. And even if you fail, you learn.

In 1949, when I was born, my father had only recently moved to New York to work for a real estate developer. The first experiences I would say, with art really is because he was so interested in abstract art that times that we did spend together as a young family were often to go to look at galleries, so I have my earliest memories going to some of the pioneering abstract expressionist galleries in New York City. He did not put any pressure on us and he didn’t try to guide us into a particular career. He wanted us to be well-educated, and once as it turned out we found architecture to be our passion.

[For] the Katonah House, he designed this house shortly after I was born which was fascinating to me as a young child. We grew up as just three, four children with different interests, who love getting together. It was very clean, white walls, one room open to the next room without a lot of partitions. So it was very modernist. There was always nice views towards natural light, so I think this is part of his interest in language which was to bring in nature into the apartment. It lifted above the ground plane. So it was really like a floating box. To me, [it’s] one of the most memorable, but also very important introductions to me to contemporary modern art.

The Wiesner Building was my building. It was the first project that I was responsible for. It was a building on the arts. It was bringing together various creative disciplines that had been distributed across the university and put into now a one-to-one building. We were trying to revive the notion that art and architecture could work together as much as they had been done in the Renaissance, we engaged in the process of selection of four artists. I enjoy working with artists. I very much am drawn to that whole notion that we can learn from each other and that art sort of serves to inspire architecture. My father generally was thinking of art as being something which stood independently of his buildings, [exemplified] by sculpture you put it in certain locations. But the collaboration that I engaged in at MIT was one where the art and the architect, we actually gave up something that we would ordinarily do as architects and we gave it to the artists to do that differently. It’s a very, very invaluable and instructive experience.

I like to tell the story that he often would come and just describe a project and then maybe leave one little small sketch. He used to use a red felt pen. [It] could be no more than two lines and then he leaves. And we take this sketch, and we go to the copier machine and we make four copies. We come back at the end of the day or the next day with what we think it might be. He’d look at them, and then he might take one of them and he’d say, ‘Well, let’s try that!’. And then he’d get another two more sketches. There’s a process that may take may take two weeks. It could even take a month to develop that idea, but the process, what’s so exciting or interesting and, I think, revealing is that it is a process that engages everybody, and so, we’re all focused on it at each level. So by the time the solution, if there is a solution, and it does take time, or a direction, we’re all sort of on board.

I was able to start working with my father on this [BOC Tower] project from the very beginning. My father asked me as his junior architect to work on this project. I worked with him from the very beginning on the original concept, so I feel very, very indebted and engaged in this whole development. This project started in 1982, finished in 1989. And I remember, just with a blank piece of tracing paper, we had already had some idea of how we were going to respond to the site. I think that my father already had this notion that if the building would be subdivided into these four quadrants and then extruded in some way that the building form might emerge that could be of interest. I simply took that idea and just extruded these four equal triangular shafts and made a very crude paper model. I showed it to him and then we began to play around with what would happen when we kind of pushed and pulled. We then, in the office, brought them to the attention of a structural engineer, Leslie Robertson who was a brilliant engineer with whom my father had worked before. He looked at the building and he held it up and he immediately, within a matter of a minute or two, intuited that if we describe the building with these diagonals across each of these forms we could create a building that was structurally very, very efficient.

This is such an important project for me, for our family, for the family’s history, and for being here in Hong Kong. It is extremely important for us. It was his first major high-rise building that he’d ever done, so that in itself was a big challenge for him. Through this project, the bank and we have become very very close, very friends and we’ve been trying to work for them for many years. It all started with the Bank of China in Hong Kong, and remains the most important project that I have done in my career including the work in my own firm. I cannot overestimate how important this project has been.