“Chinese Style: Rediscovering the Architecture of Poy Gum Lee, 1923-1968,” opening on Sept. 24 at Museum of Chinese in America

A few months after his descendants retrieved his archive from storage, the Chinese-American architect Poy Gum Lee is receiving his first retrospective. ... The show explores Mr. Lee’s designs for hundreds of buildings and interiors in New York and China. Kerri Culhane, the exhibition’s main curator, said the family’s rediscovered material has made the display “an even better story than I thought it would be.”

Mr. Lee worked on office and apartment towers, power plants, hospitals, schools, laundries and restaurants, among other building types. He combined Art Deco ziggurats and Modernist streamlining with Chinese-style pagoda roofs, brackets, balconies and latticework. He was a prolific sketcher, and did not always label his papers, so Ms. Culhane is still determining which of his plans were realized.

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Kent Jue, a grandson of Mr. Lee, said he had heard little about the wartime experiences of his relatives. “The Shanghai piece just wasn’t something they wanted to remember,” he said. The family, he added, will most likely donate the Lee archive to the Museum of Chinese in America.