"I suppose the choice was a little unorthodox. After all, some of the others were much better known. All those we considered are fine architects. But Pei! He loves things to be beautiful.... We felt that Pei's best work, as John Kennedy's was in 1960, is yet to come." Ieoh Ming Pei was a modest, low-key 48-year-old architect when Jacqueline Kennedy gave that short speech in December of 1964. A Chinese-born American architect, schooled at MIT and the Harvard Graduate School of Design, Pei had been the surprise winner in the world-wide architectural talent search for the Kennedy Library project architect.

A decade has passed since Pei began working on the Library, but for many reasons the architect's work has hardly progressed past this press conference dialogue which Pei engaged in soon after receiving the Kennedy endorsement:

Q. Mr. Pei, can you tell us what the new Kennedy Library will look like?

A. No. All I have is a blank piece of paper.

Q. There's nothing on that piece of paper?

A. Nothing at all.

But Pei will have to have this blank piece of paper filled by June 3, the date set for the release of the new Kennedy Library plans. The designer has repeatedly had to scale down and even scrap many of his original plans to appease local civic and architectural leaders who fear environmental damage to the Cambridge-area community.

Still, the 10-year Kennedy quagmire has not kept Pei from progress on other fronts, from doing what he is supposed to do best: making cities a better place to live in. The prolific architect and his staff of 110 have won wide acclaim for creating or renovating buildings in almost every large American city, including his heavily-decorated Kipps Bay Plaza and Bedford-Stuveysant Superblock in New York and his Society Hill Towers in Philadelphia.

Pei has earned his reputation in urban design not for crafting architectural prima donnas, but for building what he has called "good neighbors," edifices which easily fit into the scheme of the city. Pei, in a 1971 Business Week interview, said he believes that "A city, far from being a cluster of buildings, is actually a sequence of spaces enclosed and defined by buildings." The architect has said that he refuses to compromise or ignore the residents in his designs. In a Time interview in 1964, shortly after receiving work of the Kennedy project, Pei proclaimed that "architecture must not do violence to space or its neighbors."

But while Pei has been busy being a good neighbor in many American cities, his buildings in Boston have been having trouble making friends. Diagnosed euphemistically, Pei's problem may be what Back Bay Association president Daniel J. Ahern has called "the inevitable problems that everyone runs into when they build on Boston's weak foundations," or it may be a native reaction against disturbing Boston's more sedate areas, or possible it is plain bad luck. Whatever the reason, the New York-based architect has not had an easy time in Boston. And his hard times in the Hub have raised questions about both Pei's architectural supervision of his projects and his sensitivity to community desires.

Pei's troubles began in 1964, shortly after completing the Green Center for the Earth Sciences at MIT. The $5-million project worked fine, until students tried to get inside. Air pressure from wind whipping around the bottom floor of the building sealed the doors shut, and they had to be replaced with revolving doors at a cost of $60,000. Ann Landreth, public relations representative for Pei and Partners, explains that the building design was a common one, but that this wind-tunnel phenomenon "had never happened before."

Then there are the Boston Harbor Towers, a Pei project completed in 1973. In an April Esquire Magazine article, Gerry Nadel wrote that the high-rent tenants in the towers "are moaning about thin walls and loose plumbing." But Landreth claims that Pei and Partners "did only schematic drawings for the apartments, and not the interior." Nevertheless, Pei, as the architectural supervisor for the project, can't be completely exonerated for the faults inside the apartment.

But Back Bay expert Ahern, a collaborator with Pei on the Harbor Towers Project, voices a different, aesthetic concern about the buildings: "The towers are ponderous, lifeless, and uninspiring. They are just big tons of concrete, and really don't fit in."

Pei proclaimed that "architecture must not do violence to space or its neighbors."

And then there were the problems Pei encountered with the Christian Science Center. Pei put his classically-oriented partner, Aldo Cussutta--who has since left the firm and moved upstairs from Pei's ninth floor domain at 600 Madison Ave.--as the head of the design team. Although Cussatta "quite typically began examining the potentials of this project in the broadest urban contexts," according to a March 1973 Architecture Plus article, and though the sprawling center was in perfect harmony with Pei's clients, the building's neighbors and the site's original occupants weren't too happy about leaving to make room for the site.