RIP: The famous architect I.M. Pei has died at the age of 102.
To get a sense of what Pei’s architecture could do to an American city, check out the early 1970s video of an Oklahoma City urban renewal project embedded in this 2016 Bleat by James Lileks: “Rah-rah as you’d expect. A local booster takes a money-man and his wife around town to show what they’re doing, and when he mentioned ‘The Pei Plan’ I stopped the video. That would be I. M. Pei. That would be the last guy I wanted designing my downtown.” As Lileks writes, “This is about building things, yes. But more about destroying them.”