Suzhou Museum

Pei was born in Suzhou-connected Guangzhou but his family's ancestral home and namesake garden, the Lion Grove, sit inside the old city, a few steps from the site the municipal government offered him in 2002 for a new museum. He was in his mid-eighties and had said he was retired; he took the commission anyway, on the condition that the building respect the low, white-walled roofline of its neighbours rather than compete with it. What resulted keeps Suzhou's black-on-white palette and its vocabulary of courtyards, bridges and reflecting water, translated into modern materials: the black is now granite rather than roof tile, and the traditional timber roof structure becomes an openwork steel-and-glass lattice that reads, from below, as an abstraction of the same pitched forms. A pierced circular "moon" window at the entrance and a stone garden composed with slabs cut to suggest a Song-dynasty ink landscape make the connection explicit rather than nostalgic. Pei called it his most personal building; it opened in October 2006 as one of his very last completed works.