On Wednesday, March 29, 1989, at approximately ten o’clock in the morning, in the Cour Napoléon of the Louvre Palace in central Paris, French President François Mitterrand cut a ribbon at the base of the Pyramide du Louvre, a 21.6-meter glass-and-steel structure designed by the seventy-one-year-old Chinese-American architect Ieoh Ming Pei. The pyramid sat at the center of the seventeenth-century courtyard, framed by the four wings of the Louvre Palace, illuminated from within by the underground reception hall it covered. The structure had been six years in development. Pei had been personally selected by Mitterrand in August 1983, without a competition. The design had been completed in 1984. Construction had begun in 1985. The pyramid structure had been topped out in 1988. The public opening had been delayed multiple times.
The French public had been overwhelmingly opposed to the project during construction. The press had been almost uniformly hostile. Le Monde‘s architecture critic André Fermigier had called the pyramid “a house of the dead” and resigned from the newspaper when Le Monde published a supplement defending the design. Le Quotidien de Paris had called the structure “a gigantic and ruinous gadget.” Jean Dutourd of the Académie française had declared, “Poor France.” The pyramid was, in 1985, the most opposed civic project in modern French history.
By Wednesday, March 29, 1989, the opposition had begun to soften. Within six months of the public opening, the pyramid had become one of the most-photographed new structures in Europe. Within five years, it had become an icon of Paris equal to the Eiffel Tower. By 2003, Dan Brown’s novel The Da Vinci Code had used the pyramid as a central plot device. By 2019, when I.M. Pei died at the age of one hundred and two, the publications that had attacked him in 1985 were running tributes to his vision. The pyramid had become, in the thirty years since its inauguration, one of the most-visited tourist attractions in the world and the defining architectural object of the 1980s.
The Cour Napoléon, March 29, 1989
The public inauguration of March 29, 1989, was one of several Grands Projets openings Mitterrand presided over that year. The Grande Arche de la Défense, designed by the Danish architect Johan Otto von Spreckelsen, would open in suburban Paris on July 14, 1989. The Opéra Bastille, designed by the Uruguayan-Canadian architect Carlos Ott, would open on July 13, 1989. The Cité de la Musique and the Bibliothèque Nationale would follow in 1995. The five projects collectively represented the largest single program of French civic architecture since the Second Empire. The pyramid was the most controversial and the most iconic.
The crowd at the March 29 ceremony was approximately three thousand people. Mitterrand presided. Pei was present, as were Émile Biasini (the Grand Louvre project director who had championed Pei’s selection), Michel Macary (Pei’s French collaborating architect of record), and most of the senior French cultural and political establishment. Mitterrand cut the ribbon at the base of the pyramid and descended the underground escalator into the Hall Napoléon, the reception hall the pyramid covered. The crowd followed.
The public response within Paris was immediate. By April 1989, daily visitor numbers at the Louvre had doubled compared to 1988. By May 1989, the pyramid had appeared on the covers of Time, Newsweek, Paris Match, Le Figaro Magazine, and Vogue Paris. By the end of 1989, the museum had received approximately five million visitors, up from three and a half million in 1988. By 2018, annual visitor numbers exceeded ten million, the highest of any art museum in the world.
The architectural critics who had attacked the pyramid in 1985 began revising their assessments through the early 1990s. The pyramid had been built. It was open. It functioned. It admitted enough natural light into the underground complex to make the reception hall feel less like a basement and more like a sunlit forum. It allowed entry from a single central point rather than the three separate palace entrances the museum had used since 1793. It cut average visitor entry time from approximately twenty minutes to approximately seven. The functional success eventually overrode the aesthetic objections.
Canton to Cambridge
Ieoh Ming Pei was born on April 26, 1917, in Guangzhou (Canton), China, the eldest son of Tsuyee Pei, a senior official at the Bank of China, and Lien Kwun, a calligrapher, flutist, and devout Buddhist. The family relocated to Hong Kong shortly after his birth and to Shanghai in 1927, when Tsuyee Pei was appointed to lead the Bank of China’s Shanghai operations. Pei grew up between Hong Kong, Shanghai, and the family’s summer home in Suzhou, where he played in the famous Lion Grove Garden that would later influence his Suzhou Museum design. He attended St. John’s Middle School in Shanghai. He decided at sixteen to study architecture in America.
He emigrated to the United States in August 1935, at seventeen. He enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania but withdrew within weeks, finding the curriculum’s emphasis on classical drawing incompatible with his interest in modern construction. He transferred to MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he graduated with a Bachelor of Architecture in 1940. He worked for the U.S. National Defense Research Committee from 1942 to 1945, designing reinforced concrete structures. He married Eileen Loo, a Wellesley graduate, on June 20, 1942. He enrolled at the Harvard Graduate School of Design in 1945, studying under Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer, and received his Master of Architecture in 1946.
After Harvard, Pei spent seven years (1948 to 1955) as in-house architect for the New York real-estate developer William Zeckendorf at Webb & Knapp, designing housing developments, office buildings, and master-plan projects across the United States. The Zeckendorf years gave Pei direct experience with the financial and political dimensions of large-scale urban projects, an unusual background for an architect of his generation. He founded I.M. Pei & Associates in 1955 with two MIT classmates, Henry N. Cobb and Eason H. Leonard. The firm became Pei Cobb Freed & Partners in 1989.
The major projects between 1955 and 1983 established Pei’s reputation as an architect of civic and cultural buildings of unusual technical ambition. The National Center for Atmospheric Research (Boulder, Colorado, 1967) used red sandstone aggregate concrete to integrate with the Rocky Mountain landscape. The East Building of the National Gallery of Art (Washington, D.C., 1978) used a 19.5-degree triangle as the generative geometry of the entire building. The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library (Boston, 1979) used a 125-foot glass atrium to frame Boston Harbor. The Pritzker Prize, the architecture profession’s highest award, came in 1983. Mitterrand selected him to design the Louvre Pyramid four months later.
The Grand Louvre Project
François Mitterrand had been elected the first Socialist president of the French Fifth Republic on May 10, 1981. In September 1981 he announced the Grand Louvre project, the first of his Grands Projets cultural infrastructure program. The project’s stated objectives were to expand the Louvre’s exhibition space by approximately sixty percent, to consolidate the Ministry of Finance offices that occupied the Richelieu Wing into a new building elsewhere in Paris, to redesign the museum’s visitor circulation for the rapidly increasing tourist traffic, and to create a single unified main entrance in place of the three separate palace entrances the museum had used since 1793.
Mitterrand appointed Émile Biasini, a former cultural administrator, to direct the Grand Louvre project. Biasini conducted an informal international search for an architect across 1982 and early 1983, visiting major museum and civic projects in the United States. He met I.M. Pei at the East Building of the National Gallery of Art in Washington in late 1982 and asked him to take the Louvre commission. Pei initially declined. Biasini persisted. In July 1983, Pei traveled to Paris, met Mitterrand, and accepted the commission. The selection was announced publicly on August 11, 1983. There was no architectural competition. The decision was Mitterrand’s alone, on Biasini’s recommendation.
The absence of a competition produced immediate criticism. French architectural associations, French cultural conservatives, and the Académie française all publicly objected. The objections intensified when Pei’s design was made public in early 1984. The glass pyramid was, critics argued, both stylistically incompatible with the Louvre Palace and politically inappropriate for a French national institution to commission from a foreign architect. Multiple critics referred to the pyramid as an Egyptian symbol of death imposed on the most French building in France. Members of the Comité d’Action National pour la Défense du Louvre, an organization formed specifically to oppose the project, picketed the construction site in 1985.
Mitterrand defended Pei and the design publicly and consistently. The French left-wing nationalist press generally supported the project. The French cultural conservative press generally opposed it. The international architectural press was broadly supportive. By 1986, with the pyramid structure rising in the Cour Napoléon, French public opinion remained predominantly hostile but the political opposition had begun to lose energy. The pyramid was, by then, too far built to be stopped.
The Engineering
The pyramid’s engineering was the design. Pei specified, from the earliest sketches, that the structure must be as visually transparent as possible, so that the surrounding seventeenth-century palace would remain the dominant architectural object in the courtyard. Conventional glass was insufficient. Standard architectural glass of the period contained approximately 0.6 percent iron oxide, which produced a slight green tint that became visible across larger panel sizes. Pei needed glass with iron content below 0.02 percent, which would be effectively colorless. No commercial glassmaker produced such glass in the volumes Pei required.
Saint-Gobain, the French glass manufacturer founded in 1665 to supply the mirrors of Versailles, agreed to develop the custom glass for the pyramid. The development took approximately four years. The finished glass was an annealed low-iron extra-clear laminated glass, polished on both surfaces to achieve the optical clarity Pei specified. The total glass area of the pyramid was approximately 1,200 square meters, divided into 673 individual panels: 603 rhomboid panels for the four sloping faces and 70 triangular panels for the corners and edges.
The structural steel frame was designed by the French firms Setec (a multidisciplinary engineering consultancy) and RFR (Rice Francis Ritchie, the structural engineering practice founded by Peter Rice, Martin Francis, and Ian Ritchie). The frame is a cable-stayed lattice of approximately 200 tonnes of steel members, with the glass panels supported on stainless-steel spider connections at the panel corners. The pyramid has a base of 35.4 meters per side and a height of 21.6 meters. The slope angle is 51 degrees, approximately the slope of the Great Pyramid of Giza, a deliberate choice by Pei intended to invoke the proportions of pyramidal forms without literally replicating Egyptian architecture.
The pyramid was constructed in four phases. The underground excavation of the Hall Napoléon began in 1985. The steel frame was erected in 1986 and 1987. The glass panels were installed in 1987 and 1988. The Pyramide Inversée, the inverted glass pyramid at the western end of the Carrousel du Louvre underground shopping concourse, was added in 1993 to bring natural light into the lower-level retail space. The total cost of the pyramid and its underground complex was approximately one billion French francs (approximately one hundred and fifty million U.S. dollars at the 1989 exchange rate).
After the Pyramid
The Louvre Pyramid was the structural inflection point of Pei’s career. Before 1989, he was a respected American civic architect of the second generation of postwar modernists, with a Pritzker Prize and a strong portfolio of cultural buildings. After 1989, he was one of the most-recognized architects in the world. The commissions that followed reflected the change.
The Bank of China Tower in Hong Kong, designed for the bank his father had run, opened in 1990. At 367 meters and seventy-two stories, it was, briefly, the tallest building outside the United States. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland, Ohio, opened on September 2, 1995, a glass pyramid as the centerpiece of an idiosyncratic complex on the shore of Lake Erie. The Miho Museum in Shigaraki, Japan, opened on November 11, 1997, an eighty-percent-underground museum buried into a hillside in the Kyoto countryside. The Suzhou Museum in Pei’s family’s ancestral city in China opened on October 6, 2006, designed by Pei at age eighty-nine. The Museum of Islamic Art in Doha, Qatar, opened on November 22, 2008, Pei’s last major project at age ninety-one. All five projects used glass and geometry in ways that descended directly from the Louvre Pyramid.
Pei’s reception in France continued to soften across the 1990s and 2000s. By 1995 the pyramid was being included in French architectural surveys as a landmark of modern Paris. By 2003 it appeared on the cover of The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown’s novel, which sold approximately eighty million copies worldwide. The 2006 Ron Howard film adaptation made the pyramid one of the most-recognized buildings in twenty-first-century cinema. By the time Pei died on Thursday, May 16, 2019, at his home in Manhattan, age one hundred and two, the publications that had called him an imperialist in 1985 were running multi-page tributes to his vision. Le Monde, which had publicly opposed the pyramid in 1985 and 1988, devoted six pages to his obituary.
The pyramid’s contested 1985-89 reception is part of its meaning. The most-photographed civic structure of the 1980s was the one French public opinion had spent five years opposing. The architect who built it was an Asian-American emigrant whose father had run the Bank of China before the Communist Revolution. The president who championed it was a Socialist whose closest political ally would soon lose two of his Grands Projets architects. The structure itself was a glass pyramid, a form whose cultural lineage ran from the Old Kingdom Egyptian pyramids of the third millennium BC through to the 1989 Cour Napoléon of the Louvre Palace, with very little in between.
Pruitt-Igoe needed dynamite. The pyramid needed Saint-Gobain low-iron glass, 673 rhomboidal panels, a French Socialist president, and a Chinese-American architect willing to be called an imperialist for six years. The 1970s ended with a building coming down. The 1980s ended with a building going up.