INTERNATIONAL CASE STUDY # 01

4.1. Le Grand Louvre:

The Louvre is a museum of art and antiquities located on the Right bank of the Seine in Paris. Covering an area of 60,600 sq. m (652,300 sq. ft), and with more than 380,000 objects and 35,000 works of art, the Louvre is the largest museum in the world. The Louvre Museum could seamlessly direct visitors to 14.5 km (9 miles) of corridors and 403 rooms with this solution. It first opened as a museum in 1793, during the period of the French Revolution known as the Reign of Terror. It was said that the act of opening an art museum to the general public in a building that had once been a royal palace was inherently revolutionary. The museum houses some of the most famous and valuable pieces of art in the world, including the Venus de Milo statue, Leonardo Di Vinci's Mona Lisa, and The Last Supper. In architectural terms, the Louvre is made of cut stone and is a vast complex of wings and pavilions on four main levels.

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Despite appearing to be unified, it is the result of many phases of building, modification, destruction, and restoration that took place over several centuries. The museum is housed in the Louvre Palace which was originally built in the late 12th century under Phillip II. It remained a residence of the French kings until 1682.

4.1.1. History:

In the early 1980s, Louvre Museum was a world-class art museum bursting at its seams. It had the finest collections of art globally, yet they were running out of space to display. Because of the lack of space, the galleries were disjointed, and the visitor experience was poor. So much so, there were only two public bathrooms to cater to the 2.5 million visitors who would come in to relish the art annually. To add to the space crunch, the French Minister of Finance had claimed the Richelieu Wing of the building for their offices. Out of the three available wings, the museum couldn’t use one wing to display art exhibits. Louvre Museum’s repeated requests for space went unheeded. In 1981, socialist François Mitterrand was elected the French President. Mitterrand doubled investment in the arts and announced that The Louvre was his top priority. The same year Mitterrand announced the Grand Louvre project, which would include a redesign of the Museum and the addition of space. He also made sure the art Museum got the Richelieu Wing back.

The Pyramid with a square base was constructed entirely with glass segments and metal poles. Ninety-five tons of steel and 105 tons of aluminum support the structure. While the Louvre pyramid is 21.6 meters (71 ft)

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tall, its square base has sides of 34 meters (112 ft). The Pyramid has a total of 673 glass segments – 603 rhombi and 70 triangular-shaped. Louvre was made out of steel and glass; it was designed to the same proportions as the pyramid of Cheops, reaching a height of 20.6 m and with a square base of 35 m. The pyramid's faces are covered by nearly 700 panels of glass. In 1981, the newly elected French president, Francois Mitterrand, launched a campaign to renovate cultural institutions throughout France. One of the most advantageous of those projects was the renovation and reorganization of the Louvre. In 1983 after touring Europe and the United States, President Mitterrand commissioned the Chinese American architect, I.M. Pei. It was the first time that a foreign architect was enlisted to work on the Louvre Museum. Completed in 1989, I.M. Pei’s renovation redesigned Court Napoleon, the main court of the Louvre, to alleviate the congestion from the thousands of daily visitors. A new grand entrance provided a convenient, central lobby space separate from the galleries, which provided a focal point for the cyclical process of one’s experience through the museum. In addition to providing a new entrance to the Louvre, Pei’s design featured a new underground system of galleries, storage, and preservation laboratories, as well as a connection between the wings of the museum. The addition and relocation of the supporting spaces of the museum allowed for the Louvre to expand its collection and place more work on exhibit. Pei’s design of the Louvre addition implemented a large glass and steel pyramid that is surrounded by three smaller

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triangles that provide light to the space below Court Napoleon. For Pei, the glass pyramid provided a symbolic entry that had historical and figural importance that reinforced the main entry. The monumental appearance of the glass and steel pyramid fixed in the middle of the court provides a central focal point that complements the scale and design of the Louvre. The Louvre is one of the major tourist attractions of Paris, receiving an estimated 9.6 million visitors a year.

The sloping glass walls of the pyramid begin to pay homage to the mansard roofs of the museum, and the opaque, heavy qualities of the Louvre’s façade exaggerate the transparency of Pei’s design. With the history of the Louvre dating back to the 12th Century, one could imagine that the modern design implemented by Pei would not be fully accepted by the historically enamored Parisians. The site of the Louvre was originally a dungeon and fortress for Philippe Auguste, which was later transformed into a palace under King Francis I in 1546. It wasn’t until 1793 that Louis XVI had turned the Louvre into a museum. The Louvre has been deeply rooted in the history and culture of the Parisian people. Much of the criticism surrounding the renovation was not because of the addition to the museum itself, but more of an issue of styles. Most felt that Pei’s modern design aesthetic would clash with the Louvre’s Classical architecture, appearing as an alien form. However, as the decades have passed and Paris has modernized Pei’s design has become embedded in the Parisian culture. It is regarded with similar significance to that of the Eiffel Tower becoming an icon for the people of Paris, as well as the world. Pei’s design has become synonymous with the image of the Louvre marking it as an inseparable entity from the museum and of Paris.

The pyramid used as an entrance in the Louvre's courtyard has the same proportions as the Great Pyramid of Giza. The choice of this figure also serves as a reminder of the importance of the Egyptian antiquities collection inside the museum, as does the Obelisk in

Place de la Concorde not far from there, the other side of the Jardin des Tuileries. At its base, the pyramid measures 116 feet wide and 70 feet high. 95 tons of steel and 105 tons of aluminum support the structure. The main pyramid is accompanied by three smaller ones. They have been positioned to create light shafts for access to the museum’s collections. Lastly, the inverted pyramid is the one visible from underground when you use the Carrousel entrance to the Louvre. In the proper sense, it is an upsidedown, suspended pyramid. The glass panes of the pyramids are made up of diamonds and triangles. This mixture creates the triangular form in irregular proportions, which creates the appearance of cut jewels.

4.1.5. Its halls were once home to a strange royal ritual: Before the Louvre was a museum, it was a royal residence, home to several generations of kings. King Henry IV was among them and he enacted a kingly ritual known as the Royal Touch in the Louvre’s halls. French royals at the time were thought to have Godgiven power to rule. One such reward of divine backing? The ability to heal illnesses such as swollen lymph nodes, a side effect of tuberculosis with a mere touch. And so, Henry IV received tuberculosis sufferers in one of the Louvre’s halls, anointing the sick with holy water while intoning, “Le Roy te touché, Dieu te guerit” (“The king touches you, God is healing you”). (AD Classics, 2010)

4.1.6. Pei’s glass pyramid was meant to mesh with the landscape—not fight with it: Louvre has a rich history—and to modernize a building with such a significant past is no small undertaking. So, in 1983, when French President Francois Mitterrand called on Pei to revive the ailing building, the architect took some time pondering his design. Pei kept the project a secret from his team for four months and took several surreptitious trips to the museum before drawing up blueprints. When he finally put pen to paper, his plans included a new entrance, a network of rooms to make the museum-going more pleasant (an information center, a cafeteria), and, famously, the glass pyramid. Parisians at the time were scandalized

Figure 2.32. View of Louver when the design was unveiled. Pei’s pyramid was a “gigantic, ruinous gadget,” as one New York Times critic wrote in 1985. The overwhelming sentiment at the time was that

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Pei's pyramid was a modernist eyesore jutting starkly against its baroque surroundings. But perhaps Pei’s critics would have been gentler had they known how meticulously he tried to marry his design to its landscape. As Michael Flynn, an architect from Pei’s team, reminisced to Architect Magazine, Pei wanted the glass to be “superclear”—so if you peered through it, the glass wouldn’t “alter your perception of the color of the existing buildings.” Clear glass doesn’t sound like a tall order, but at the time, the most glass used in buildings had a greenish tint. Finding clear glass was a lot of legwork. Designing the framework was no less laborious. Pei wanted to match the metal to the color of the roofs of its surrounding buildings. As it turned out, those buildings sported 11 shades of gray so, long conversations ensued about which hue to choose. A study was conducted on the height of the pyramid of the existing buildings. The pyramid was designed to fall beneath a certain line, so it wouldn’t stick out above rooftops. The architect did want the piece to be as unobtrusive as possible which didn’t stop the controversy but does help to contextualize it.

(Author/Elizabeth-Evitts-Dickinson, 2017)

4.1.7. Collection and permanent exhibition:

Encompassing some 400,000 pieces, the permanent collection of the museum is divided into many chronological and thematic sections, grouped into nine departments: Decorative Arts; Egyptian Antiquities; Greek, Etruscan, and Roman Antiquities; Near Eastern Antiquities; Islamic Art; Paintings; Prints and Drawings; Sculptures; and Architectural Views. The original core of the collection was based on artworks acquired over time by the Kings of France, which comprised several masterpieces of European art, including the works brought

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to France by Leonardo da Vinci. After the transformation into a public museum, the Louvre’s collection was enriched by paintings, sculptures, and antiquities gathered by Napoleon during his military campaigns, especially in Italy and Egypt; and further enlarged thereafter with notable acquisitions, such as that of the famous Greek sculpture of the Winged Victory of Samothrace. The many exhibition rooms in which the collection is displayed are located on three levels and into three main wings: the Richelieu wing, the Sully Wing, and the Denon wing. The most popular sections are those dedicated to the art of Mesopotamia, Ancient Egypt, Classical Greece, Rome, European Middle-Ages and Renaissance; the museum also includes large collections of decorative and applied arts, graphic arts, and jewelry (which includes the famous Regent diamond)(Secrets of the Louvre Museum in Paris | Architectural Digest, 2017)

INTERNATIONAL CASE STUDY # 02

4.2. TIRPITZ / BIG expands WWII bunker to form TIRPITZ, a 'hidden' museum sunken into the Danish coast

Architects: Bjarke Ingels Group, Bjarke Ingels Group

Area: 2800 m²

Year: 2017