France on Friday started an architectural competition for the daunting task of expanding the Louvre in Paris, in a bid to ease overcrowding at the world’s biggest and most visited museum.
The project, which will create a new entrance and give the Mona Lisa a new exhibition space, was first announced in January by President Emmanuel Macron. He set the ambitious target of welcoming 12 million visitors per year — three million more than today — while also solving crowd-management headaches at the museum.
The architectural competition will be decided by a 21-person international jury, which will choose five finalists in October. A winner will be announced in early 2026, according to the Louvre.
Part of the brief is to design a new gallery for the Mona Lisa, the 16th-century masterpiece by Leonardo da Vinci that attracts droves of visitors. The museum’s management said on Friday that the new exhibition space would be about 33,000 square feet and should also include room to explain the painting’s history, its famous 1911 theft, and its modern-day iconic status.
“Our aim is to offer a high-quality encounter with this masterpiece,” Laurence des Cars, the Louvre’s president, said in an interview with Le Monde published on Friday, arguing that the space needed to offer “a genuine time for contemplation.”
Visitors will have to book specific tickets to see the Mona Lisa and her enigmatic smile, “with a minimum waiting time,” des Cars said.
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François Chatillon, the Louvre’s chief architect, told Le Monde that nowadays the painting was “viewed in a matter of seconds from a distance of several meters.”
“For this new space, the curators want the painting to be closer to visitors, more on their scale,” he said.
Macron had said in January that the dedicated room for the Mona Lisa would be one of several new exhibition spaces created underneath the Cour Carrée, the Louvre’s easternmost courtyard, and connected to the existing museum.
The architectural competition, for a project that French authorities are calling a “New Renaissance” for the Louvre, also calls for plans for a new entrance in the museum’s easternmost facade, near the Seine River.
The aim is to lessen pressure on the Louvre Pyramid, a glass-and-steel structure designed by the architect I.M. Pei in the 1980s, during the museum’s last major overhaul. Long lines form every day at the pyramid, which is currently the museum’s main entrance.
“Pei’s pyramid is brilliant, but it’s no longer enough to accommodate the nine million visitors who flock to our museum every year,” des Cars told Le Monde.
She added that the new entrance would not be a “disruptive” construction like the pyramid, adding that architects should aim to avoid clashing with the classic 17th-century colonnade that adorns the facade.
Credit: nytimes
