The Louvre Museum

We are continuing a series of art walks in the French capital. Our guide is the professional architect Anna Bakhlina. Anna will talk about the most remarkable buildings in Paris, theirs story and curious facts of their creation.

The object of our today’s episode is The Louvre, the world’s most-visited museum and a historic landmark of the city. Originally built in the late XII to XIII centuries, this palace was many times expanded and reconstructed. It was progressively transformed into the museum, housing one of the reachest collections of fine art on the planet.

The contemporary modification of the Louvre was undertaken by the President François Mitterrand in the 1980s. Monsieur Mitterrand following his visionary Grand Louvre Plan, personally selected the Chinese-American architect I.M. Pei to design a glass pyramid and it’s underground space. Thus, the Finance Ministry which until that moment was occupying the North Wing of the Louvre was relocated to devote almost the entire Louvre building to the museum. The project, just as in the case of the Pompidou Centre, caused many debates and it took few years to approved it.
The open spaces surrounding the pyramid were inaugurated in 1988, and its underground lobby was opened in 1989.

The glass pyramid has become one of the symbols of the French capital. Every year it attracts millions of tourists who come to capture its well-known shape on their phones and cameras. But what secrets does it hide?

About our cultural guide in a nutshell:
From 2020 Anna Bakhlina is an independent architect in Paris.
She began her career as a professional volunteer and a researcher, in the international settlement of Auroville in South India.
Until recently, Anna was a key member of the design team for the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art SANAA, the 2010 Pritzker Prize-winning bureau in Tokyo. In 2016, as a leading architect at atelier Tekuto, she was involved in the development of the Boltun project, which won the annual national Japan Concrete Institute award as the best concrete building of the year in Japan (2018).

Over the past 2 years in collaboration with buro LOCAL, Anna worked on a joint Franco-Russian research project for the housing sector in Russia.