In 2008, at age 91, I.M. Pei accepted the commission to design a chapel for the Miho Institute of Aesthetics, having already executed Miho’s belltower and Miho Museum. The 5,220-square-foot building was one of Pei’s smallest. Completed in 2012, it was also his last (among many that were supposed to have been). With a certain poetry that Pei himself acknowledged, his career began and ended with a chapel, starting 52 years earlier with Luce Chapel in Taiwan, almost identical in size and similarly distilled from enormous complexity into pure form.
