The Louvre Pyramid: Why a President Put Glass in a Palace, and Why Paris Argued

The Louvre Pyramid is the third stop of the 11-stop Louvre and Tuileries walk, standing in the Cour Napoléon between the Richelieu and Denon wings. Most visitors know it as a photograph. Fewer know what stood there before, and fewer still know that it and the arch behind you do not line up.

The commission

I. M. Pei was named architect in July 1983, with the backing of President François Mitterrand, for the Grand Louvre project, the plan to give the whole palace to the museum. The Louvre calls Pei Chinese-American and quotes him saying that he had worked as a landscape designer rather than an architect and was inspired by Le Nôtre more than by anyone else. The Pyramid was inaugurated in great pomp on 29 March 1989, after four years of building. The frame is a fine steel structure, about 6,000 bars and 2,150 joints in 95 tonnes of steel, built by firms that specialised in ship rigging, and Saint-Gobain made the extra-white glass after two years of research.

What it replaced

Before the Pyramid the courtyard held two squares created by Hector Lefuel, Napoleon III's architect, and a car park, and the Richelieu wing was still the Finance Ministry's. The Pyramid is about 21 metres high and 35 metres wide at its base, covering 1,000 square metres. Today it is the entrance for individual visitors; groups, members and others use the Richelieu entrance and the Porte des Lions, or the Carrousel du Louvre.

No pane count

The glass is where the mythology grew. A persistent legend says the Pyramid has exactly 666 panes, the number of the beast. The Louvre has given different counts over the years, and the figures in circulation disagree, so we give no number. The legend says more about the people who counted than about the building.

The critics

The Louvre's own text admits that opponents denounced the project as a pharaonic building site. We do not repeat any percentage of public opinion, because we could not trace one to a source. What we can say is the pattern the museum itself points to: Pei places himself in the long history of the Louvre's transformations, and the Pyramid is one more of them.

The line it does not follow

The Louvre explains that, because of the bend of the Seine, the palace and the Tuileries gardens are off axis, and that the Pyramid and the Arc du Carrousel are not aligned. Pei's solution, in the museum's account, was to place a statue of Louis XIV in the line between them. The Pyramid's five forms bracket the site: the big one above the Cour Napoléon, three small ones lighting the three entrances, and an inverted pyramid in the Carrousel du Louvre with 84 diamond panes and 28 triangular ones, its glass hidden in the planting above.

Under your feet

The medieval Louvre is not under this courtyard: its keep lay under the Cour Carrée. The excavations here in the 1980s found a medieval faubourg instead, with streets, a church dedicated to Saint Thomas and the Quinze-Vingts hospital. Nothing of it is visible at the Pyramid.

Reading it on the walk

Take the Pyramid as the one modern sentence in a long argument. For the program it belongs to, read the Grand Louvre companion; for the nineteenth-century rebuild that shaped the streets around the palace, read Reading Haussmann's Paris; and for the building the Opera's architect designed, see the Palais Garnier piece.