The Grand Louvre refers to the decade-long project initiated by French President
François Mitterrand
François Marie Adrien Maurice Mitterrand (26 October 19168 January 1996) was President of France, serving under that position from 1981 to 1995, the longest time in office in the history of France. As First Secretary of the Socialist Party, he ...
in 1981 of expanding and remodeling the
Louvre
The Louvre ( ), or the Louvre Museum ( ), is the world's most-visited museum, and an historic landmark in Paris, France. It is the home of some of the best-known works of art, including the ''Mona Lisa'' and the ''Venus de Milo''. A central l ...
– both the building and the museum – by moving the
French Finance Ministry, which had been located in the Louvre's northern wing since 1871, to a different location. The centerpiece of the Grand Louvre is the
Louvre Pyramid
The Louvre Pyramid (Pyramide du Louvre) is a large glass and metal structure designed by the Chinese-American architect I. M. Pei. The pyramid is in the main courtyard ( Cour Napoléon) of the Louvre Palace in Paris, surrounded by three smalle ...
designed by Chinese-American architect
I. M. Pei
Ieoh Ming Pei
– website of Pei Cobb Freed & Partners ( ; ; April 26, 1917 – May 16, 2019) was ...
, which was also the project's most controversial component. The Grand Louvre was substantially completed in the late 1990s, even though its last elements were only finalized in the 2010s.
Background
![Louvre Tuileries 1859](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fe/Louvre_Tuileries_1859.jpg)
Following
Louis XIV's move to Versailles in the 1660s, the
Louvre Palace
The Louvre Palace (french: link=no, Palais du Louvre, ), often referred to simply as the Louvre, is an iconic French palace located on the Rive Droite, Right Bank of the Seine in Paris, occupying a vast expanse of land between the Tuileries Ga ...
ceased to be mainly used as a royal palace and became inhabited by artists, civil servants and the occasional royal, as well as hosting various bodies and institutions. Even after the
Louvre Museum was first established in 1793, many other activities still existed in the palace. This mixed-use reality was perpetuated in
Napoleon III's Louvre expansion, which resulted in the entrenchment of administrative offices in the Louvre's North Wing, from 1871 mainly the
Ministry of Finance.
The expansion of the museum's collections, combined with the gradual shift of curatorial practices towards less cluttered displays, meant that the Louvre Museum was increasingly short of space, despite the periodical release of some of its holdings to other museums in Paris. Thus, the pre-Columbian artifacts of the ''
musée américain'' left in 1887 to the newly created
Musée d'Ethnographie du Trocadéro
The Musée d'Ethnographie du Trocadéro (Ethnographic Museum of the Trocadéro, also called simply the Musée du Trocadéro) was the first Anthropology, anthropological museum in Paris, founded in 1878. It closed in 1935 when the building that hous ...
; in 1905 the ethnographic collections of the ''
Musée de Marine'' were divided between the Trocadéro museum, the
National Antiquities Museum and the
Chinese Museum (Fontainebleau)
The Chinese Museum or ''musée chinois'' is a section of the Palace of Fontainebleau that keeps artifacts from Qing dynasty China, the Kingdom of Siam, and other Asian countries, including diplomatic gifts and plunder from the Second Opium War. O ...
; the rest of the ''
Musée de Marine'' followed in the early 1940s, to the
Palais de Chaillot; the Louvre's extensive Asian art collections were handed over to the
Guimet Museum
The Guimet Museum (full name in french: Musée national des arts asiatiques-Guimet; MNAAG; ) is an art museum located at 6, place d'Iéna in the 16th arrondissement of Paris, France. Literally translated into English, its full name is the Nation ...
in 1945; and most of its French artworks created after 1848 (except those which had to remain in the Louvre because of binding bequest provisions) were headed for the
Musée d'Orsay
The Musée d'Orsay ( , , ) ( en, Orsay Museum) is a museum in Paris, France, on the Left Bank of the Seine. It is housed in the former Gare d'Orsay, a Beaux-Arts railway station built between 1898 and 1900. The museum holds mainly French art ...
by the early 1980s.
Even so, the Louvre Museum was cramped and lacked any space for modern facilities such as reserves, educational spaces, shops, restaurants and cafés, not to mention security screening, cloakrooms or washrooms. Its exterior spaces had also deteriorated from their heyday during the
Second French Empire
The Second French Empire (; officially the French Empire, ), was the 18-year Empire, Imperial Bonapartist regime of Napoleon III from 14 January 1852 to 27 October 1870, between the French Second Republic, Second and the French Third Republic ...
, and had never been remodeled after the destruction of the
Tuileries Palace
The Tuileries Palace (french: Palais des Tuileries, ) was a royal and imperial palace in Paris which stood on the right bank of the River Seine, directly in front of the Louvre. It was the usual Parisian residence of most French monarchs, from ...
in the 1870s had fundamentally altered the logic of their arrangement. In the central courtyard, the two octagonal gardens were poorly maintained and surrounded by the parking lots for Finance Ministry employees (to the north) and museum staff (to the south).
Because of lack of parking space in the vicinity, unsightly tourist buses were permanently stationed along the southern side of the palace.
The natural solution was to relocate the ministry to another site and to repurpose the North Wing for an expanded museum with improved and larger support facilities. This option was advocated in 1950 by
Georges Salles
Georges Salles (24 September 1889 – 20 October 1966) was a 20th-century French art historian and curator.
Biography
A specialist of the East, George Salles led excavations in Iran, Afghanistan, and China. He was then curator at the Asia ...
, then the head of the French Museum Administration, and subsequently by other experts and curators. But it ran against the considerable power of the Finance Ministry, whose senior bureaucrats had no appetite for abandoning their offices' convenient and highly prestigious Louvre location.
Announcement and controversy
François Mitterrand
François Marie Adrien Maurice Mitterrand (26 October 19168 January 1996) was President of France, serving under that position from 1981 to 1995, the longest time in office in the history of France. As First Secretary of the Socialist Party, he ...
unexpectedly announced his decision to remove the Finance Ministry from the Louvre and dedicate the entire building to museum use at the end of his first presidential press conference on 24 September 1981. It is probable that the influence of art historian
Anne Pingeot
Anne Pingeot (born 13 May 1943 in Clermont-Ferrand, Puy-de-Dôme) is a French art historian specialising in French sculpture of the 19th century and author of several books and catalogues. She was curator at the department of sculpture at the Louv ...
, a curator at the Louvre since 1972 and Mitterrand's longstanding though secret mistress, played a significant role in the decision, which was also recommended after Mitterrand's election by his high-profile Culture Minister
Jack Lang.
The project, immediately dubbed ''Grand Louvre'', became the most high-profile of Mitterrand's ''
Grands Projets'' which also included the
Arab World Institute, the ''
Grande Arche
La Grande Arche de la Défense (; "The Great Arch of the Defense"), originally called La Grande Arche de la Fraternité (; "Fraternity"), is a monument and building in the business district of La Défense and in the commune of Puteaux, to the west ...
'', the ''
Opéra Bastille'', and later the new site of the
Bibliothèque nationale de France
The Bibliothèque nationale de France (, 'National Library of France'; BnF) is the national library of France, located in Paris on two main sites known respectively as ''Richelieu'' and ''François-Mitterrand''. It is the national repository ...
and the
Jean-Marie Tjibaou Cultural Centre
The Jean-Marie Tjibaou Cultural Centre (french: Centre culturel Tjibaou), on the narrow Tinu Peninsula, approximately northeast of the historic centre of Nouméa, the capital of New Caledonia, celebrates the vernacular Kanak culture, the indige ...
, as well as the new building for the relocated Finance Ministry in the Paris neighborhood of
Bercy.
The project immediately encountered criticism, including on ground of cost, not least from the finance ministry and the powers-that-be it was able to influence, which for that matter included Mitterrand's Prime Minister
Pierre Mauroy.
[ Meanwhile, on 27 July 1983 Mitterrand announced his decision to entrust the project design to Chinese-American architect ]I. M. Pei
Ieoh Ming Pei
– website of Pei Cobb Freed & Partners ( ; ; April 26, 1917 – May 16, 2019) was ...
, who had acquired fame from successful museum designs such as those for the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the National Gallery of Art
The National Gallery of Art, and its attached Sculpture Garden, is a national art museum in Washington, D.C., United States, located on the National Mall, between 3rd and 9th Streets, at Constitution Avenue NW. Open to the public and free of char ...
's East Wing in Washington DC. Pei's proposed concept of a glass pyramid leading to underground spaces at the center of the Louvre, first designed in late 1983 and presented to the public in early 1984,[ added to the controversy: ostensibly on esthetic and preservationist grounds, but more substantially as a political proxy for attacks on Mitterrand and his "monarchical" leadership style. The campaign against the pyramid peaked in 1985, with the creation by former Culture Minister of an association dedicated to that fight (''association pour le renouveau du Louvre'') and the publication of the polemic ''Paris mystifié: La grande illusion du Grand Louvre'' by respected scholars , Sébastien Loste et ]Antoine Schnapper
Antoine Schnapper (10 July 1933 – 29 August 2004) was a French art historian on art of the 17th and the 18th century. A student of André Chastel, he organised many retrospectives on artists of that period, notably one at the Louvre in 1989 on J ...
, with a preface by celebrated photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson
Henri Cartier-Bresson (; 22 August 1908 – 3 August 2004) was a French humanist photographer considered a master of candid photography, and an early user of 35mm film. He pioneered the genre of street photography, and viewed photography as cap ...
.
Mitterrand invested significant political capital into the project, however, and was able to bring it to full completion. To create a sense of irreversibility, finance minister Pierre Bérégovoy
Pierre Eugène Bérégovoy (; 23 December 1925 – 1 May 1993) was a French politician who served as Prime Minister of France under President François Mitterrand from 2 April 1992 to 29 March 1993. He was a member of the Socialist Party and M ...
moved his office to a temporary location outside of the Louvre in January 1986. Following the trouncing of Mitterrand's Socialist Party
Socialist Party is the name of many different political parties around the world. All of these parties claim to uphold some form of socialism, though they may have very different interpretations of what "socialism" means. Statistically, most of th ...
at the 1986 legislative election, the new finance minister Édouard Balladur announced the reversal of the decision to leave the Louvre and took up his office there in mid-April. But Balladur did not prevail, as other key members of the government, despite being political opponents of Mitterrand, acknowledged the popularity and relevance of the grand Louvre project, which was actively defended by culture minister François Léotard. A compromise was eventually announced on 29 July 1987, with a ten-year schedule for the project completion. The move of the ministry was again accelerated following Mitterrand's re-election in 1988. On 11 July 1989, Bérégovoy, again finance minister, symbolically returned to Mitterrand the keys of the finance ministry's offices in the Louvre, and the demolition and building works swiftly started in the vacated wing.[
]
First Phase: Pyramid and underground spaces
Work on the first phase of the project started with extensive archaeological excavations, which complemented earlier campaigns that had uncovered parts of the Medieval Louvre in 1866 and 1882 and revealed unfinished 17th-century works in front of the Colonnade in 1964. The excavations were led by Michel Fleury
Michel Fleury (17 November 1923 in Paris – 18 January 2002 in Paris) was a French historian, archivist and archaeologist, specialising in the history and archaeology of Paris. He is buried in the cemetery of the church of Saint-Germain de Loi ...
and Venceslas Kruta
Venceslas Kruta (born 4 November 1939) is a French archaeologist and historian. He is the director of European protohistory studies at the École pratique des Hautes Études (EPHE), and Professor emeritus at the Sorbonne University. Kruta has also ...
in the Cour Carrée (1983–1985), by Pierre-Jean Trombetta and Yves de Kisch in the Cour Napoléon
The expansion of the Louvre under Napoleon III in the 1850s, known at the time and until the 1980s as the Nouveau Louvre or Louvre de Napoléon III, was an iconic project of the Second French Empire and a centerpiece of its ambitious transforma ...
(1984–1986), and by Paul Van Ossel in the southwestern section of the Carrousel Garden
The Tuileries Garden (french: Jardin des Tuileries, ) is a public garden located between the Louvre and the Place de la Concorde in the 1st arrondissement of Paris, France. Created by Catherine de' Medici as the garden of the Tuileries Palace in ...
(1985–1987). A later campaign in the central and northern sections of the Carrousel Garden took place in 1989–1990. In parallel to the excavations in the Cour Carrée, the façades around the square were renovated and the new space was inaugurated on 26 June 1986.[
Following the completion of the pyramid and its three accompanying ''pyramidions'' ("pyramidlets") in late 1987, the open space surrounding it, rebranded ''Cour Napoléon'', was opened to the public on 14 October 1988, including the copy in lead of ]Gian Lorenzo Bernini
Gian Lorenzo (or Gianlorenzo) Bernini (, , ; Italian Giovanni Lorenzo; 7 December 159828 November 1680) was an Italian sculptor and architect. While a major figure in the world of architecture, he was more prominently the leading sculptor of his ...
's equestrian statue of Louis XIV placed at the exact end of Paris's '' axe historique''. The pyramid itself, together with the vast lobby beneath it (''"Hall Napoléon"'') and the extensive surrounding underground complex, was opened on 29 March 1989. This included the renovated remains of the medieval Louvre, namely the external moat, the internal ditch surrounding the circular keep
A keep (from the Middle English ''kype'') is a type of fortified tower built within castles during the Middle Ages by European nobility. Scholars have debated the scope of the word ''keep'', but usually consider it to refer to large towers in c ...
, and a partly preserved gothic room dubbed the ''salle Saint-Louis''.
Meanwhile, all new initiatives to renovate the Louvre's exhibition rooms were brought under the Grand Louvre project management. New galleries of 18th- and early 19th-century French paintings on the 2nd floor of the Cour Carrée, designed by Italo Rota
Italo Rota (Milan, 2 October 1953) is an Italian architect.
Biography
Born in Milan in 1953, he obtained a degree in Architecture at Milan Polytechnic University in 1982. Before that, he had started off in the architecture firms of Franco Alb ...
, opened on 18 December 1992.[
File:Louvre Pavillon Horloge.jpg, The Cour Carrée after its mid-1980s renovation
File:Louvre Parijs 25-02-2019 10-31-56.jpg, The pyramid and its three surrounding "pyramidions"
File:Louis XIV Le Bernin Louvre 120409 03.jpg, The statue of Louis XIV, copy of marble original by ]Bernini
Gian Lorenzo (or Gianlorenzo) Bernini (, , ; Italian Giovanni Lorenzo; 7 December 159828 November 1680) was an Italian sculptor and architect. While a major figure in the world of architecture, he was more prominently the leading sculptor of his ...
File:Paris - Pyramide du Louvre (31398171506).jpg, The ''pavillon Richelieu'' seen through the pyramid
File:Musée du Louvre r (2).JPG, Spiral staircase in the ''Hall Napoléon''
File:DSF2827 (46684722475).jpg, ''Hall Napoléon'' with Richelieu Wing in background
File:Louvre Lobby, 19 April 2010 001.jpg, Escalators in the ''Hall Napoléon''
File:Mur est du Louvre médiéval.jpg, Renovated moat of the Medieval Louvre
File:Louvre médiéval, Paris 6 March 2015 004.jpg, Renovated ditch around the medieval keep
File:Salle Saint-Louis (Louvre).jpg, ''Salle Saint-Louis''
File:Casque de parade de Charles VI (original).jpg, remains of a ceremonial helmet of King Charles VI found in the excavations
File:Casque de parade de Charles VI.jpg, Reconstruction of Charles VI's helmet
Second Phase: Richelieu Wing and Carrousel Mall
On 18 November 1993, Mitterrand inaugurated the next major phase of the Grand Louvre plan: the renovated North (Richelieu) Wing in the former Finance Ministry site, the museum's largest single expansion in its entire history, designed by Pei, his French associate Michel Macary, and Jean-Michel Wilmotte. In January 2000 and July 2001 respectively, a few more rooms opened on the Western end of the Richelieu Wing, of 19th-century decorative arts (first floor) and Northern European paintings (second floor).
Further underground spaces known as the Carrousel du Louvre
The Carrousel du Louvre is an underground shopping mall in Paris, France, managed by Unibail-Rodamco. The name refers to two nearby sites, the Louvre museum and the Place du Carrousel. The mall contains a famous skylight, ''La Pyramide Inversée'' ...
, centered on the Pyramide Inversée
The Louvre Inverted Pyramid (french: Pyramide inversée du Louvre) is a skylight constructed in the Carrousel du Louvre, an underground shopping mall in front of the Louvre Museum in France. It may be thought of as a smaller sibling of the mor ...
(inverted pyramid) and designed by Pei and Macary, had opened in stages during October and November 1993. Like in the first phase, this had started in May 1989 with an excavation campaign,[ which uncovered a long section of the 14th century Wall of Charles V.
File:Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel and Aile de Marsan, Palais du Louvre, Paris 1993.jpg, The ]Carrousel du Louvre
The Carrousel du Louvre is an underground shopping mall in Paris, France, managed by Unibail-Rodamco. The name refers to two nearby sites, the Louvre museum and the Place du Carrousel. The mall contains a famous skylight, ''La Pyramide Inversée'' ...
under construction, 1993
File:Paris DSC 0200 (49629102723).jpg, The Pyramide Inversée
The Louvre Inverted Pyramid (french: Pyramide inversée du Louvre) is a skylight constructed in the Carrousel du Louvre, an underground shopping mall in front of the Louvre Museum in France. It may be thought of as a smaller sibling of the mor ...
, Carrousel du Louvre
The Carrousel du Louvre is an underground shopping mall in Paris, France, managed by Unibail-Rodamco. The name refers to two nearby sites, the Louvre museum and the Place du Carrousel. The mall contains a famous skylight, ''La Pyramide Inversée'' ...
File:Carrousel du Louvre Septembre 2016.jpg, Carrousel du Louvre shopping center
File:Carrousel du Louvre - Mur d'escarpe.jpg, Wall of Charles V in the Carrousel du Louvre
File:Passage Richelieu, Louvre Museum, Paris 28 March 2019.jpg, Reopened Passage Richelieu
File:Louvre room 229-Khorsabad-27841 AO004.001.jpg, Cour Khorsabad
File:Cour Puget, Louvre Museum, Paris 28 May 2017.jpg, Cour Puget
File:Louvre-CourMarly.jpg, Cour Marly
File:Grand escalator du Louvre.jpg, Escalators in Richelieu Wing
File:Naploeon III Apartments in the Louvre.jpg, The ''appartements Napoléon III'' in the Richelieu Wing
File:Palais du Louvre P1000464 (2465144855).jpg, Dining room of the ''appartements Napoléon III''
File:Louvre Museum 2 - Paris November 2008.jpg, First-floor decorative arts section designed by Jean-Michel Wilmotte
File:Richelieu wing - Louvre.jpg, ''Salle Rubens'' designed by I. M. Pei
Ieoh Ming Pei
– website of Pei Cobb Freed & Partners ( ; ; April 26, 1917 – May 16, 2019) was ...
, with the Marie de' Medici cycle
The Marie de' Medici Cycle is a series of twenty-four paintings by Peter Paul Rubens commissioned by Marie de' Medici, widow of Henry IV of France, for the Luxembourg Palace in Paris. Rubens received the commission in the autumn of 1621. After neg ...
File:Two children, Musee du Louvre, Paris 2014.jpg, One of the second-floor rooms displaying Northern European paintings
Third Phase: Sully and Denon Wings
The third phase was less spectacular than the first two, as it involved the renovation and technical upgrading of spaces that for the most part had already been part of the museum before the Grand Louvre started. Air conditioning was installed in the galleries, not least the Grand Gallery which had been notorious for its hot summers.
New galleries of foreign sculpture opened on 28 October 1994. More rooms of Italian paintings and Greek, Etruscan and Roman antiquities opened on 21 January 1997. The renovated Middle Eastern Antiquities spaces, named "Sackler Wing" in 1997 in response to financial support from the Sackler family
The Sackler family is an American family who founded and owned the pharmaceutical companies Purdue Pharma and Mundipharma. Purdue Pharma, and some members of the family, have faced lawsuits regarding overprescription of addictive pharmaceutical d ...
(that naming was reversed in 2019), opened on 10 October 1997. A large number of additional renovated rooms opened on 21 December 1997 including Egyptian and classical antiquities, Italian paintings and drawings. The new rooms of the Department of Egyptian Antiquities, designed by Atelier de l'Ile, included unprecedented space for Coptic art, e.g. the reconstituted Bawit
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monastery church from Upper Egypt
Upper Egypt ( ar, صعيد مصر ', shortened to , , locally: ; ) is the southern portion of Egypt and is composed of the lands on both sides of the Nile that extend upriver from Lower Egypt in the north to Nubia in the south.
In ancient ...
. On 28 October 1998, the renovated rooms of the Campana collection
Giampietro Campana (1808 – 10 October 1880), created marchese di Cavelli (1849), was an Italian art collector who assembled one of the nineteenth century's greatest collection of Greek and Roman sculpture and antiquities. The part of his collec ...
opened in the southern wing of the Cour Carrée. Room renovations in the Denon Wing included that of the and , designed by and executed in 1997–1998. A new entrance at the , also designed by Yves Lion's architecture firm, opened on 22 May 1999, leading on the first floor to new rooms of Spanish paintings. Meanwhile, the Carrousel Garden
The Tuileries Garden (french: Jardin des Tuileries, ) is a public garden located between the Louvre and the Place de la Concorde in the 1st arrondissement of Paris, France. Created by Catherine de' Medici as the garden of the Tuileries Palace in ...
was recreated on plans by Jacques Wirtz
Jacques Wirtz (31 December 1924 – 21 July 2018) was a Belgian landscape architect.
Wirtz was born in Schoten, a suburb of Antwerp. His family were stockbrokers. He studied landscape architecture at a horticultural school in Vilvoorde. He was fo ...
between 1991 and 2001.[
From the 2000s, any remaining parts of the Grand Louvre's implementation become increasingly indistinguishable from the ongoing operation and projects of the Louvre Museum. New galleries on the Roman-era Eastern Mediterranean (), initially included in the successive Grand Louvre plans as "trois antiques" (since they blend objects from the three departments of Egyptian, Oriental, and Classical antiquities), opened in September 2012 together with the new department of Islamic art, whose creation on ]Jacques Chirac
Jacques René Chirac (, , ; 29 November 193226 September 2019) was a French politician who served as President of France from 1995 to 2007. Chirac was previously Prime Minister of France from 1974 to 1976 and from 1986 to 1988, as well as Ma ...
's initiative was not labeled as part of the Grand Louvre. As late as March 2021, the President of the Louvre referred to the "Grand Louvre program" as relevant and "still unfinished", with specific reference to sections of the Denon Wing that still await renovation.
Project management and administration
From the start of the project, Mitterrand endeavored to ring-fence the Grand Louvre project from the hostile finance ministry and the normal interagency decision-making process.[ By tradition, the Louvre Museum had very little autonomy, with curatorial policy steered by the Culture Ministry's ''Direction des Musées'' and commercial/outreach policy in the hands of the Réunion des Musées Nationaux. Each of the seven departments acted as a separate curatorial fiefdom, and human resources issues were partly delegated to the powerful employees' unions.]
Mitterrand appointed , an experienced administrator, first as project manager on 17 September 1982 and then as president of the ''Etablissement Public du Grand Louvre'' (EPGL), a semi-permanent project organization created on 2 November 1983 and maintained until July 1998. Biasini retired in July 1987 and was succeeded as EPGL President by Pierre-Yves Ligen (1987–1989) and Jean Lebrat (1989–1998); from 1988 to 1992 he was state secretary (junior minister) in charge of the ''grands travaux''.[ In July 1998, the project was substantially completed and the remaining coordination tasks were transferred to the newly created national service now known as the '.
For the management of the museum itself, a self-standing ''Établissement Public du Musée du Louvre'' was created on 22 December 1992, headed by the Director of the Louvre Museum. The Louvre's management autonomy was further strengthened in the early 2000s.
]
Assessment
The Grand Louvre project cost over a billion euros. It more than tripled the Louvre's surface area, from 57,000 to almost 180,000 square meters. Within that, the exhibition space almost doubled from 31,000 to 60,000 square meters, and the number of exhibits on display increased from 20,600 to over 34,000. Museum attendance more than doubled, from an average 2.8 million visitors per year in 1980–1988 to over 5 million in 1990–2001.[
As early as the late 1980s, when the pyramid opened, it had become widely accepted as an architectural success, even by many of its former critics.][ Pei's project has won further praise since then. On Pei's death at age 102 in 2019, his ]New York Times
''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid d ...
obituary noted: "Within a few years the pyramid had become an accepted, and generally admired, symbol of a re-energized Paris." Pei himself had called his time working on the Louvre project, from 1983 to 1993, "the 10 most exciting years of my life."[
The American Institute of Architects gave Pei's firm its prestigious Twenty-five Year Award in 2017, noting that the pyramid "now rivals the ]Eiffel Tower
The Eiffel Tower ( ; french: links=yes, tour Eiffel ) is a wrought-iron lattice tower on the Champ de Mars in Paris, France. It is named after the engineer Gustave Eiffel, whose company designed and built the tower.
Locally nicknamed "'' ...
as one of France’s most recognizable architectural icons (...) Pei wove together an unprecedented amount of cultural sensitivity, political acumen, innovation, and preservation skill", with one of the jurors adding that it "established a benchmark for new, modern architecture that enriches an historic setting with integrity and respect for both history and progress."
Other awards won by Pei Cobb Freed & Partners for the project include the ''prix d'excellence'' of the Associations des Ingénieurs Conseils du Canada (1989); the First Prize, Structural-Buildings Category of the New York Association of Consulting Engineers (1988); the Design Award of the European Convention for Constructional Steelwork (1989); the ''prix spécial'' of the (1988); the Grand Award of the American Concrete Institute, Central New York Chapter (1989); and Le Moniteur's Equerre d'Argent / Prix Spécial Grands Projets Parisiens (1989).
Several of the project's protagonists published books specifically dedicated to their Grand Louvre experience, including Biasini,[ Pei, and Lang.]
See also
* Napoleon III's Louvre expansion
* Grands Projets of François Mitterrand
The Grands Projets of François Mitterrand (variants: Grands Travaux or Grands Projets Culturels; officially: Grandes Opérations d'Architecture et d'Urbanisme) was an architectural programme to provide modern monuments in Paris, the city of monume ...
Notes
Bibliography
* Bezombes, Dominique, editor (1994). ''The Grand Louvre: History of a Project''. Paris: Le Moniteur. .
* Biasini, Émile; Jean Lebrat; Dominique Bezombes; Jean-Michel Vincent (1989). ''The Grand Louvre: A Museum Transfigured 1981–1993''. Milan/Paris: Electa Moniteur. .
{{Grands Projets of François Mitterrand
Louvre
Louvre Palace
I. M. Pei buildings