How I. M. Pei Shaped a Change-Resistant Paris

On March 4, 1989, the Louvre Pyramid designed by I. M. Pei was inaugurated by French President Francois Mitterrand. From the article:

"How I. M. Pei Shaped a Change-Resistant Paris

Parisians hated Pei’s pyramid when it first opened. It is now as synonymous with the Louvre as the Mona Lisa.

PARIS—Here in France, I. M. Pei, who died this week, is best known for one thing: The glass pyramid in the courtyard of the Louvre Museum. 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. 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.”

Architecture is always political. 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. “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. “It was perceived as the eruption of a foreign object—and what is more, an American object. It has to be seen also in the framework of France and anti-Americanism, which is sort of a permanent position.”

But 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. Two years ago this month, President Emmanuel Macron, the youngest president in French history, had his inauguration in front of the Louvre. 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."