Pei's Pyramid Perplexes Paris

By Wolf VonEckardt.

The architect plans to put an expanded Louvre under glass

The Paris newspaper Le Monde indignantly compared it to "an annex to Disneyland." A consortium of French environmental groups said it would be suitable only if it were built in the middle of a desert. Worse yet, the General Inspector of National Palaces lamented that the architect, however distinguished, was a foreigner, alors.

The cause of all this furor is a plan by U.S. Architect I.M. Pei to build a 66-ft-high glass pyramid smack in the center of one of the sacred precincts of French culture: the courtyard of the venerable Louvre Museum. The structure, which will be lighted at night, will be surrounded by three smaller pyramids connected by triangular pools and fountains. The whole design in itself resembles a huge frozen fountain. It will be the centerpiece of a comprehensive expansion and reorganization of the Louvre ordered by French President Franc,ois Mitterrand. No price tag has been put on the project, which is expected to take five years to complete. Mitterrand, an admirer of Pei's East Wing of the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., personally selected the 66-year-old, Chinese-born architect for the job; and last week, despite the outcry over the glass pyramid, he officially approved Pei's plan.

Built over a period of eight centuries, the Louvre is an imposing palace but, notwithstanding its fabulous art collection, an impossible museum. The French call it un theatre sans coulisses, a theater without a backstage. Some 90% of its space is crammed with exhibits of paintings and sculptures, leaving only 10% for such essentials as storage and offices, to say nothing of research and restoration facilities. For years expansion has been blocked by the fact that one entire wing of the U-shape building has been occupied by the Ministry of Finance, which Mitterrand is now moving to new quarters. The traffic flow of the 3.7 million people who trek through the Louvre every year is chaotic.

Visitors can get in and out at a dozen places, but there is no central entrance, no orientation. Anybody who decides to take a second look at a painting may have to retrace his steps for ten or 15 minutes.

"When President Mitterrand approached me," recalls Pei, "I was not so sure that anything much could or should be done about the Louvre. I certainly did not want to take part in a competition. I asked for three months to think about the problem--not to draw or design anything; to think." Some architects work from bursts of inspiration sketched on the proverbial back of an envelope. Pei arrives at his designs through the meticulous exercise of logical deduction. He concluded that a thorough revamping of the museum was possible without changing any of the existing architecture. The key: the creation of new space underground, a solution that, in various forms, had been urged before by other architects. Pei's plan calls for an extensive, 750,000-sq.-ft. subterranean level, including a grand entrance hall, shops, restaurants, audiovisual theaters, storage spaces and a parking area.

To have the necessary dignity and grandeur, an entrance hall requires daylight. It also requires a marker, a visible symbol. Says Pei: "You can't just walk down as into a subway. The Louvre needs something prestigious." The idea of putting glass over the entrance took care of the daylight, but the glass needed a shape.

Pei and his designers tried transparent cubes, domes and pyramids; they finally settled on the pyramid form because it would be distinctive and yet would not clash with the classic lines of the old building. The proportions of the pyramid (modeled after the famous Egyptian pyramid at Giza) would make it two-thirds the height of the Louvre's fac,ade. Computer-generated graphics commissioned by Pei indicated that the glass structure would be barely visible to visitors approaching the Louvre from the Champs Elysee and quite unobtrusive even from the Louvre's Tuileries Gardens.

This has not kept the arguments from raging on. The newspaper Le Figaro is continuing a three-week-old survey tallying the views of its readers for and against Pei's plan (some 90% favor the renovation but oppose the pyramid, says the paper).

The government has announced that a model of the project will be put on public view at an exposition in April. The model may give Parisians the impression of being consulted about changes in their revered museum, but in fact there is little likelihood that Mitterrand will reconsider his go-ahead for the plan. French Presidents, like kings and emperors before them, frequently exercise their power on behalf of the greater glory of Paris (and thereby their own image). Mitterrand seems clearly determined to follow in the tradition, pyramid and all. Says Emile Biasini, the civil servant who headed Mitterrand's task force on the project: "People are shocked now because they are always shocked by something new. But in ten years they would be shocked if we decided to move it." --By Wolf VonEckardt.

Reported by Harriet Welty/Paris

With reporting by Harriet Welty/Paris