An architectural bridge between two worlds

Two decades ago, Li Chung (Sandi) Pei worked alongside his father, I.M. Pei, as Suzhou Museum took shape. Now, 20 years after the museum's completion, Sandi, 77, is back in Suzhou, Jiangsu province, once again — this time with his daughter, Anna Alice Pei, who is beginning to explore the family legacy in her own way.

For the Pei family, China and the United States have never been simply two places on a map, divided by distance and joined only by circumstance. Across three generations, they have been points of departure, places of belonging and, ultimately, worlds to be connected.

I.M. Pei left China for the US, where he became one of the most renowned architects of his generation, while carrying with him a deep cultural imprint of his homeland. Sandi grew up and was educated in the US, yet over the past several decades has maintained a sustained engagement with China, participating in its architectural and urban development. Anna, the third generation, is now approaching that inheritance from another direction — through archives, family memory and the preservation of the traces left behind by her grandfather.

The forms have changed from one generation to the next. The impulse has not.

Suzhou Museum has become one of the most tangible expressions of the Pei family's connection to Suzhou.

"A bridge is a good metaphor," Sandi says. "Suzhou means a great deal. This is our ancestral home."

The Pei family has more than 600 years of history in Suzhou. The city's gardens, architecture and cultural traditions formed part of the family's inheritance long before architecture became the medium through which later generations would engage with the wider world.

Sandi recalls how deeply those surroundings shaped his father. In Suzhou, I.M. Pei was drawn to gardens and landscapes, and particularly to the garden rocks that had been shaped over generations by craftsmen. What fascinated him was not simply their physical beauty, but the continuity they embodied — the way the hand of one generation could remain visible in something passed on to the next.