The rigging holding the pyramid together was built by Navtec Rod Rigging of Littleton, MA, USA. It consists of 603 rhombus-shaped and 70 triangular glass segments. The structure was formed with glass segments. “Is it the elusive late-medieval condition,” or the era of Viollet-le-Duc, “who über-medievalized the church?”Īs I wrote here, the pull between preservation and innovation is the central tension of Macron’s presidency-how to change a country resistant to change. The building was commissioned by the President of France François Mitterrand in 1984. “Then you have an intellectual, even theological, discussion about what space is in the contemporary imagination and what historical state is meant to be re-created,” as Cohen put it. Its layering of architectural elements makes the Notre-Dame debate even more complex than the Louvre one. In the 19th century, Viollet-le-Duc renovated it to recall medieval architecture. Should the cathedral be rebuilt exactly as it was, or should this be an opportunity to build something wild and new? A greenhouse on the roof? A Santiago Calatrava spine? The conversations have begun, even though the damage is still being assessed.īut the cathedral itself was a work of the imagination.
#Louvre pyramid architect how to#
The controversy over Pei’s Louvre pyramid brings to mind a new debate that’s only now beginning to unfold in France, over how to renovate Notre-Dame cathedral after a catastrophic fire there last month destroyed the roof and spire. Read: France’s paradoxes, embodied in a cathedral It sent a message that this was a president who embraced culture and who, with his nascent En Marche movement, was breaking with his Socialist predecessor the way Mitterrand, a Socialist president, had broken with his right-wing predecessors. Two years ago this month, President Emmanuel Macron, the youngest president in French history, had his inauguration in front of the Louvre. It has to be seen also in the framework of France and anti-Americanism, which is sort of a permanent position.”īut over the years, the pyramid slowly came to grow on France, to the point that it’s now as synonymous with the Louvre as the Mona Lisa. “It was perceived as the eruption of a foreign object-and what is more, an American object. “The debate was very intense-you can even say ferocious,” Jean-Louis Cohen, an architectural historian at NYU and the Collège de France, told me. President François Mitterrand, who wanted to leave his own mark on Paris, had chosen Pei for the project, without a competition, and he stood by the architect against the howls of protest. Le Monde’s architecture critic at the time called the structure “a house of the dead” and said Pei was treating the courtyard of the Louvre “like an annex of Disneyland or bringing Luna Park back from the dead.”Īrchitecture is always political. When it opened in 1989, two centuries after the French Revolution, it was seen as a revolution of its own-and not necessarily a welcome one. The Louvre Pyramid is a large glass and metal pyramid surrounded by three smaller pyramids, in the main courtyard of the Louvre Palace in Paris, one of the richest museums in the world. Pei who passed away at the age of 102 recently. Pei, who died this week, is best known for one thing: The glass pyramid in the courtyard of the Louvre Museum. The Louvre Pyramid is one of the most outstanding projects designed by Chinese-American architect I.
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