I. M. Pei

I have a great love for nature. That must have started somewhere down back home, I think, because my family own one of the better known gardens in Soochow, so I played there, and I lived there, and so I must have absorbed something there. So I continue to have a great interest in nature.

I think the artistic side of architecture was natural to me. My mother was an artist and a poet.

It is good to learn from the ancients. I'm a bit of an ancient myself. They had a lot of time to think about architecture and landscape.

The essence of architecture is form and space, and light is the essential element to the key to architectural design, probably more important than anything. Technology and materials are secondary.

Even a beautiful piece of work can be overshadowed, destroyed, by something else.

Modern architecture needed to be part of an evolutionary, not a revolutionary, process.