![]() ![]() With Pei's passing in May 2019, the popularity of the famous pyramid will only get bigger. ![]() However, as the main entrance to the world's largest and second most well-attended museum, no one visits Paris without passing through the aesthetically jarring 71-foot-tall glass pyramid topping the subterranean lobby in the center of the Louvre Palace's vast Napoleon Courtyard.Īttendance to the museum skyrocketed after the opening of the pyramid and, today, Pei's polarizing masterpiece is just as big an attraction as the crowd-drawing works of art housed within the sprawling museum, the slightly smirking Da Vinci subject included. Sure, it's not the Arc de Triumph, the Notre Dame Cathedral or the Eiffel Tower in terms of sheer historic prominence these structures have been emblematic of Paris for centuries longer than Pei's modernist pyramid. And many still do.īut much like the Eiffel Tower - a structure also detested by more than a few Parisians when it was erected as the temporary and dauntingly tall centerpiece for 1899's Exposition Universelle - the Louvre Pyramid has survived its early controversies and gone on to be regarded as one of Paris' most photogenic architectural landmarks. Pei's pyramidal entrance pavilion at the Louvre Museum was completed in 1989. More than a few critics screamed "Sacré bleu!" when Chinese-American architect I.M.
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