Holiday Buying Guide 2008

The architect I.M. Pei, who turned 91 this year, has said that the Museum of Islamic Art that opened in Doha, Qatar, last month will be his last project. So this lordly text and picture book (Rizzoli; 368 pages), which begins with an unbuilt project from 1948 and ends with the Qatar museum, is truly, as billed, the complete works. Because Pei was the most elegant of Modernists, matching pure geometry to rich materials, the works are, mostly, choice. His serene white grid apartment complexes in Philadelphia and New York City, the magnificent East Building of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Glass Pyramid in front of the Louvre in Paris and the lyrical Miho Museum near Kyoto, Japan, are all the expression of man who never believed that spare form meant bare bones.

—Richard Lacayo

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