While Aulenti was busy with the Musée d’Orsay, across the Seine Ieoh Ming Pei was building another of Mitterrand’s Grand Travaux: the pyramid of the Louvre, which anointed him on a world scale. The Cantonese who emigrated to America, however, was then already a leading figure in his adopted country, the author of milestones like the Mesa Laboratory of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, and the East Building of the National Gallery of Art. A long list of landmark works and his equally lengthy subsequent career – he died in 2019 at the age of 102 – are until January the theme of an exhibition at the M+ Museum in Hong Kong.