Paris’s landmark museum has opened its doors to architects worldwide, searching for a concept that will ease record crowds and finally grant the Mona Lisa a room of her own.
The Louvre spent much of June battling staff walkouts and tourist logjams. On June 27 it answered back, inviting design teams to submit proposals for a new entrance and a purpose-built Mona Lisa gallery, part of a five-year overhaul budgeted at about €400 million.
President Emmanuel Macron has framed the project as a “New Renaissance,” and the brief is clear: relieve pressure on I. M. Pei’s glass pyramid while safeguarding a collection that draws nearly nine million visitors a year.
The new entrance is slated for the museum’s eastern Perrault Colonnade. Unlike the 1989 pyramid, the winning design must fold into 17th-century stonework rather than compete with it, a balancing act between heritage and twenty-first-century crowd control.
Da Vinci’s celebrity painting will travel downstairs. Plans call for a 33,000-square-foot subterranean hall beneath the Cour Carrée, accessed with a timed ticket separate from the main galleries, giving the portrait space to breathe and visitors a calmer view.
The stakes are high. Water leaks, temperature swings, and swelling lines have exposed the building’s frailties; an unannounced strike this spring left thousands stranded in the courtyard, underscoring the urgency of change.
A 21-person jury will shortlist five teams in October, with a winner named early next year. Construction funding will mix state support, private gifts, and a new €10 surcharge for non-EU visitors, an idea already rippling across other French museums.
When the gallery opens, visitors will descend into a vaulted room carved beneath the courtyard floor, where climate-controlled walls and low-glare lighting frame the Mona Lisa without the usual crush of selfie sticks. Separate entry windows promise shorter waits and, at last, a chance to meet her gaze in something like peace.
