Passage # 44-47 After visiting the Museum of Islamic Art, people can’t seem to get the
Museum out of their mind. There’s nothing revolutionary about the building.
But its clean, chiseled forms have a tranquility that distinguishes it in an age
that often seems trapped somewhere between gimmickry and a cloying
nostalgia.
Part of the allure may have to do with I. M. Pei, the museum’s architect. Pei
reached the height of his popularity decades ago with projects like the East
Building of the National Gallery of Art in Washington and the Louvre pyramid
in Paris. Since then he has been an enigmatic figure at the periphery of the
profession. His best work has admirers, but it has largely been ignored within
architecture’s intellectual circles. At 91 and near the end of a long career, Pei
seems to be enjoying the kind of revival accorded to most serious architects if
they have the luck to live long enough. But the museum is also notable for its place within a broader effort to
reshape 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 foreign
universities — are often dismissed in Western circles as superficial fantasies.
As the first to reach completion, the Museum of Islamic Art is proof that the
boom is not a mirage. The building’s austere, almost primitive forms and the
dazzling collections it houses underscore the seriousness of the country’s
cultural ambition. Perhaps even more compelling, the design is rooted in an optimistic
worldview, — one at odds with the schism between cosmopolitan modernity
and backward fundamentalism that has come to define the last few decades in
the Middle East. The ideals it embodies — that the past and the present can
co-exist harmoniously — are a throwback to a time when America’s overseas
ambitions were still cloaked in a progressive agenda. To Pei, whose self-deprecating charm suggests a certain noblesse oblige, all
serious architecture is found somewhere between the extremes of an overly
sentimental view of the past and a form of historical amnesia. “Contemporary architects tend to impose modernity on something,” he said
in an interview. “There is a certain concern for history but it’s not very deep. I
understand that time has changed, we have evolved. But I don’t want to forget
the beginning. A lasting architecture has to have roots.” This moderation
should come as no surprise to those who have followed Pei’s career closely. Pei
obtained his fame for the design of the Kennedy Library in Boston in the
mid-1970s. The library, enclosed behind a towering glass atrium overlooking
the water, was not one of Pei’s most memorable early works, nor was it
particularly innovative, but the link to Kennedy lent him instant glamour. The building’s pure geometries and muscular trusses seemed at the time to
be the architectural equivalent of the space program. They suggested an
enlightened, 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 the
values that Kennedy’s generation embodied could be preserved in stone, steel
and glass. In many ways Mr. Pei’s career followed the unraveling of that era, from the
economic downturn of the 1970s through the hollow victories of the Reagan
years. Yet his work never lost its aura of measured idealism. It reached its
highest expression in the National Gallery of Art’s East Building, a composition of angular stone forms completed in 1978 that remains the most
visible emblem of modern Washington. Since that popular triumph Mr. Pei has often seemed to take the kind of
leisurely, slow-paced approach to design that other architects, no matter how
well established, can only dream of. When first approached in 1983 to take
part in a competition to design the addition to the Louvre, he refused, saying
that he would not submit a preliminary design. President François Mitterrand
nevertheless hired him outright. Mr. Pei then asked him if he could take
several months to study French history. “I told him I wanted to learn about his culture,” Pei recalled. “I knew the
Louvre well. But I wanted to see more than just architecture. I think he
understood immediately.” Mr. Pei spent months traveling across Europe and
North Africa before earnestly beginning work on the final design of the glass
pyramids that now anchor the museum’s central court.
In 1990, a year after the project’s completion, he left his firm, handing its
reins over to his partners Harry Cobb and James Ingo Freed so that he could
concentrate more on design. More recently he has lived in semi-retirement,
sometimes working on the fourth floor office of his Sutton Place town house or
sketching quietly in a rocking chair in his living room. He rarely takes on more
than a single project at a time. Such an attitude runs counter to the ever-accelerating pace of the global
age — not to mention our obsession with novelty. But if Mr. Pei’s methods
seem anachronistic, they also offer a gentle resistance to the short-sightedness
of so many contemporary cultural undertakings. Many successful architects today are global nomads, sketching ideas on
paper napkins as they jet from one city to another. In their designs they tend
to be more interested in exposing cultural frictions — the clashing of social,
political and economic forces that undergird contemporary society — than in
offering visions of harmony. Mr. Pei, by contrast, imagines history as a smooth continuous process — a
view that is deftly embodied by the Islamic Museum, whose clean abstract
surfaces are an echo of both high Modernism and ancient Islamic architecture.
Conceived by the Qatari emir and his 26-year-old daughter, Sheikha al
Mayassa, 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 collection
of Bedouin encampments and fishing villages. The aim is to recall a time that
extended from the birth of Islam through the height of the Ottoman Empire,
when the Islamic world was a center of scientific experimentation and cultural
tolerance. “My father’s vision was to build a cross-cultural institution,” said Sheikha al
Mayassa, who has been charged with overseeing the city’s cultural
development, during a recent interview here. “It is to reconnect the historical
threads 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’s
culture — to capture, as he put it, the “essence of Islamic architecture.”
The museum’s hard, chiseled forms take their inspiration from the ablution
fountain of Ibn Tulun Mosque in Cairo, as well as from fortresses built in
Tunisia in the eighth and ninth centuries — simple stone structures strong
enough to hold their own in the barrenness of the desert landscape. 【題組】47. The word “gimmickry” in the first paragraph means __________.
(A) mimicry (B) irony
(C) trick (D) amnesia