Word: pei
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...television broadcasts the week before, beamed his Fudan speech live on Shanghai television, though without translation. Official press accounts the next day, however, omitted his references not only to the Declaration of Independence, but to the Bible and the contributions of two Chinese immigrants to the U.S., Architect I.M. Pei and Computer Entrepreneur An Wang...
...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...
...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 façade. Computer-generated graphics commissioned by Pei indicated that the glass structure would be barely visible to visitors approaching the Louvre from the Champs Elysée 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...