Overview
- Pei Cobb Freed & Partners has formally given the firm’s project archive of I.M. Pei to the MIT Museum, and intake of the materials is underway.
- The donation comprises roughly 1,500 rolls of architectural drawings, 50 models, and about 1,000 linear feet of manuscripts and papers covering some 60 projects.
- The archive contains materials for Pei’s landmark commissions such as the Louvre Pyramid, the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, the East Building of the National Gallery of Art, and four Pei-designed buildings on MIT’s campus.
- MIT Museum staff and the School of Architecture and Planning plan to use the collection for teaching, research, and exhibitions, with curators prioritizing student-era work and unbuilt projects that reveal Pei’s design process.
- The museum aims to finish processing and cataloguing the collection by fall 2028, which will enable wider scholarly access and could reshape study of 20th-century architectural practice and pedagogy.