Creator of Louvre pyramid turns 100
Pei endured a roasting from critics before the giant glass structure opened in 1989
The modernist architect I.M. Pei, who was once pilloried for plonking a glass pyramid into the courtyard of the Louvre, turns 100 today with his controversial creation now an icon of the French capital.
The Chinese-American designer endured a roasting from critics before the giant glass structure opened in 1989, with up to 90 per cent of Parisians said to be against the project at one point.
“I received many angry glances in the streets of Paris,” Pei later said, confessing that “after the Louvre I thought no project would be too difficult.”
Yet in the end even that stern critic of modernist “carbuncles”, Britain’s Prince Charles, pronounced it “marvellous”. And the French daily
which had led the campaign against the “atrocious” design, celebrated its genius with a supplement on the 10th anniversary of its opening.
Pei’s masterstroke was to link the three wings of the world’s most visited museum with vast underground galleries bathed in light from his glass and steel pyramid.
It also served as the museum’s main entrance, making its subterranean concourse bright even on the most overcast of days.
Pei, who grew up in Hong Kong and Shanghai before studying at Harvard with the Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius, was not the most obvious choice for the job, having never worked on a historic building before.
Impressed Mitterrand
But the then French president Francois Mitterrand was so impressed with his modernist extension to the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC that he insisted he was the man for the Louvre.
The Socialist leader was in the midst of attempting to transform Paris with a series of architectural “grands projects” that included the Bastille Opera and the Grand Arch of La Defense.
Already in his mid-60s and an established star in the United States for his elegant John F. Kennedy Library and Dallas City Hall, nothing had prepared Pei for the hostility of the reception his radical plans would receive.