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 <em>Mona Lisa</em>.
by Rachel Donadio
May 17, 2019
2 minutes
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’s architecture critic at the time “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.”
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