Remembering I.M. Pei as designer of the Rock Hall — not a masterpiece, but still pretty great

[jserraglio]

By Steven Litt
Cleveland Plain Dealer

One of the few journalists left on staff whose work is worth reading

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.clevel ... utType=amp

[John F]

Looks to me like a recap of Pei's glass pyramid in the Louvre courtyard. Maybe he ran out of ideas?

[jserraglio]

Maybe he ran out of ideas?

Unlikely. The bldg as it stands represents Pei's substantial revamping of his original design which was to be sited downtown opposite the faded icon of Cleveland's Terminal Tower and had no pyramid whatsoever (there's an illustration of that proposed design in the article).

Steven Litt (a critic of the Rock Hall who regards Pei's Louvre as artistically superior to it) states that Pei was forced to come up with a brand new idea for a lakefront site and implies that Pei's new design, the one that got built, purposefully evoked his earlier bldg for the Louvre and did so to associate rock music with fine art.

Implying that rock deserved a museum comparable to the Louvre would have been even more startling a quarter century ago than it is today, particularly for an elite architect like Pei whose buildings were mostly commissioned by and served the elite.

So Pei was not just innovative but influential in a good way too. A couple decades later, the Nobel Prize for Literature went to a rock musician who had long since been enshrined in that Cleveland museum.

Anyways, don't that RRHF look as much like a Le Corbusier as it do Pei's Louvre?