“Even though he is gone, his philosophy and his mixture of East and West will forever be a legacy in Hong Kong.”

On Friday afternoon, Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor released a statement mourning Pei’s death.

“Pei is one of the world’s most well-known architects and in the past, his works won him recognition, including the 1983 Pritzker Prize,” she said, adding the Bank of China Tower had “become a proud and iconic landmark”.

Earlier in the day, Secretary for the Environment Wong Kam-sing, also an architect and known for green building designs, paid tribute to Pei, pointing out that Sunning Plaza, the master’s other creation in the city, once offered a classic public space in the district.

Wong told the Post that unlike other commercial developments, the plaza did not take the podium approach.

“Overall, it offered various [ground-level] public spaces and good urban air ventilation,” he said.

Born in Guangzhou in 1917, Pei moved to Hong Kong with his father in his early childhood, and later studied at St Paul’s College Primary School before leaving for Shanghai at the age of 10.

At 17, he moved to the US to study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and later Harvard University, where the seeds of his illustrious career in architecture would be planted.

In 1935, as he became a professional, Pei never forgot his ties to Hong Kong and mainland China.

“I have lived in the US for more than 60 years but I am still Chinese and I still believe in its philosophies. Of course I understand the Western mindset but my Chinese roots are deep and the two do not contradict,” he said in a television interview in 2009.

He once said his life philosophy was influenced heavily by his family and especially his grandfather, all of which would later cultivate in him a relationship between life and architecture.

“You have to take into consideration light and the movement of people which animate both form and space to create architecture,” Pei once said in the book Conversations with I.M. Pei: Light is the Key, by Gero von Boehm.

“I like to think that buildings are designed for people and for that reason I prefer to design public buildings which usually are used by a lot of people who will interact with that spatial experience,” Pei was quoted as saying in the book.

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The Bank of China Tower, in this sense, was designed by Pei on the belief that its display should be organic and connected to people, nature, place and time. The tower’s triangular structure represents bamboo shoots, a symbol of prosperity and the sustenance of life.

In the book, Pei also said one of the most difficult challenges he faced when designing the tower was a technical factor. “The site was surrounded by [a roadway with heavy traffic] and there was no possibility to make an entrance,” he added.

He also said that at the time, its neighbour, the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, had just completed its new headquarters, designed by another giant of the architectural world, Norman Foster. The HSBC building was received with wide acclaim, which added more pressure on Pei’s project.

“I felt compelled to respond even with limited means and on a less than ideal site,” Pei explained.

He landed the job in 1982 when two bank representatives sought help from Pei’s father, who was a former general manager at the company. Pei was persuaded to take on the project.

He also accepted the challenge knowing that history had come full circle – his father initiated the construction of the old Bank of China building in the 1920s.

Another one of Pei’s works in the city was Sunning Plaza in Causeway Bay. The landmark was featured in a scene from local action film A Better Tomorrow, released in 1986. In 2013, the building was demolished for development.

Pei’s brand of modernism – mostly using sharp edges with innovative blending of glass and steel – was reflected in his Hong Kong creations, Professor Lau said.

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Recalling an encounter with Pei, Lau said he remembered the revered architect as humble and respectful. “I met him at the construction site in Central, where the bank tower now sits, and I saw him speaking to workers about details of the rocks and fountain that were displayed on the side of the building. Architects rarely pay attention to the specifics of projects, but he did and it was heartening.”

Lau said he was also inspired by Pei to continue to serve as an educator when the former made a second visit to Hong Kong in the 1980s.

“He was in town to give a talk to architecture students at the University of Hong Kong, and he said to me that teaching the subject was very important and that we needed to do our best to nurture new blood and train them to become modern architects,” he said. Lau was a lawmaker who represented the architectural, surveying and planning functional constituency from 2004 to 2012.

Among the endless sources Pei drew inspiration from, a sentimental location remains the Shizilin Garden, or Lion Grove Garden in Suzhou, where he frequented as a child.

Perhaps fitting then, that for his final act, Pei returned to Suzhou, his ancestral home, to design the Suzhou Museum, at the grand age of 85. The museum boasts white walls and grey roofs echoing the traditional Chinese style positioned around water.

Just as he has always kept his designs grounded in Chinese elements, Pei and his wife also made sure their children never forgot their Asian roots, through their Chinese names. His youngest son Li Chung Pei was named “Sandi”, which means third brother in Chinese, Pei once said in a New York Times interview.

But perhaps what captures his deep ties to Chinese culture most was a piece of advice Pei said his grandfather once gave him at eight. It was a Confucius quote: “If one day you are doing important things, always do them by means of virtue and you will be like the North Star, which keeps its place while all other stars turn towards it.”

Bank of China released a statement on Friday to express the company’s sorrow. It said Pei and his family had a long and deep relationship with the bank over the years. While Pei had designed multiple office buildings for the bank, his father Pei Tsu-yee was the first general manager to head the Hong Kong office of the bank.

“Mr Pei’s demeanour as a master and immortal contribution would be everlasting and we would never forget,” the bank said.