Renowned Chinese-born architect Ieoh Ming Pei, popularly known as I. M. Pei, died on May 16 at age 102.

Pei's modern designs and high-profile projects made him one of the most prominent architects of the 20th century.

Pei was born in Guangzhou, south China's Guangdong Province, and raised in Hong Kong and Shanghai before moving to the United States in 1935. He studied architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University.

Since the 1940s, he was the mastermind behind a wide variety of famous buildings including the glass pyramid at the Louvre in Paris, the Bank of China skyscraper in Hong Kong and the John F. Kennedy Memorial Library in Boston.

Pei won the Pritzker Architecture Prize, known as the Nobel Prize of architecture, in 1983.

The Committee of 100 (C100), a premier U.S. organization of Chinese-American leaders from different fields, issued a statement on May 16, mourning the passing of the acclaimed architect, who was also a co-founder of the C100.