Interesting to look at and liveable are orthogonal qualities at best and opposite at worst. One of those is truly important for inhabitants of a building, while the other is truly important to the architect's reputation. I'll let you guess which I think is which.

Personally, I'm tired of architecture being treated as a grotesque form of sculpture.

One of these is not like the other.

I've been in a few IM Pei buildings, and even worked in one. They were pleasant places to be and functional. I have the utmost respect for him. He's had a few buildings where the function was art (e.g. galleries), so they didn't follow that, but it made sense. He's had a few failures too.

But on the whole, I have the utmost respect for him as an architect.

Good to hear he's one of the orthogonals then :) at least occasionally

Calatrava is also well known for projects that go over budget and aren't designed with usage in mind.

Form over function.

That last one looks like an alligator enclosure at a zoo.

That was probably partially due to poor image selection on my part. Here's one that I think is a slightly better representation of the building:

https://mir-s3-cdn-cf.behance.net/project_modules/max_1200/3...

I think that while the building uses a lot of elements of brutalist style, it also does a good job incorporating natural light. The art in the picture below doesn't isn't particularly compelling to me, but I like the architecture:

https://live.staticflickr.com/1742/42628537001_fe8a195275_b....

is this the museum in Pasadena?

Des Moines

https://desmoinesartcenter.org/about/architecture/i-m-pei/

First picture shows a huge hall with no place to sit, no place to relax if you are hard of walking. No condensation places for people to hang onto and have a conversation or a break.