Infinite Patterns in I.M. Pei’s Furniture Diagrams

“In 1969, the Cleo Rogers Memorial Library, designed by I. M. Pei & Partners, was completed in the small town of Columbus, Indiana. According to project architect Ken Carruthers, who was obsessed with the golden ratio, the building rigorously employs ancient proportional systems.

Fully opaque on its east and west facades, the curious monolith is clad in Flemish bond brick and has tall, slender windows set back between structural piers on the north and south sides. In his unpublished memoir, Carruthers describes the building as a ‘lofty classical pavilion, more like an asymmetrical Erechtheion’, that frames a civic plaza with its neighbour, the First Christian Church (designed by Eliel Saarinen and realised in 1943). The plaza would eventually be punctuated by a gift from Columbus’ famed patrons, the Miller Family, who commissioned Large Arch from Henry Moore at I.M. Pei’s suggestion. Pei reportedly observed his own children playing around a smaller version at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and thought that a similar statue at a larger scale would balance the void between the two buildings. Cast in Berlin, then shipped across the Atlantic Ocean to New Orleans, the bronze statue sailed up the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers to Louisville before being transported on a flatbed truck to Columbus.”

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