William Zeckendorf Sr. was a prominent American real estate developer. Through his development company Webb and Knapp — for which he began working in 1938 and which he purchased in 1949 — he developed a significant portion of the New York City urban landscape. Architects I. M. Pei and Le Corbusier designed structures for Zeckendorf's development projects.
Zeckendorf in New York, 1952
Ieoh Ming Pei was a Chinese-American architect. Born in Guangzhou into a Chinese family, Pei drew inspiration at an early age from the garden villas at Suzhou, the traditional retreat of the scholar-gentry to which his family belonged. In 1935, he moved to the United States and enrolled in the University of Pennsylvania's architecture school, but quickly transferred to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Unhappy with the focus on Beaux-Arts architecture at both schools, he spent his free time researching emerging architects, especially Le Corbusier.
Pei in 1980
As a child, Pei found the Shizilin Garden in Suzhou to be "an ideal playground".
Pei describes the architecture of Shanghai's Bund waterfront area (seen here in a 2004 photo) as "very much a colonial past".
Pei's first project (1949): 131 Ponce de Leon Avenue, Atlanta
