End of the Pei Way

When the National Gallery’s East Building opened last weekend after three years of renovation, no discerning visitor could miss the influence of one critic. In 1998, THE WEEKLY STANDARD’s Andrew Ferguson read I.M. Pei’s then twenty-year-old design as a mark of the age—an unpromising one. Above all it was an “advertisement for the cleverness of the man who designed it,” he wrote. Galleries cramped and tucked off the side of a gaping atrium fail the function of an art museum, and succeed as testament to the architect’s taste for triangles. Pei’s tightly angled plan evoked wonder—and Ferguson wondered: “Come to think of it, where the hell is the art?”