Episode Details

In 1981 French president François Mitterrand launched the Grand Louvre project to fix a museum that was really a former royal palace, a chain of disconnected wings where growing crowds jammed narrow doors. In 1983 he chose the Chinese-American architect I. M. Pei, whose answer was to dig under the Cour Napoléon and build one large underground lobby that sends visitors up into the three wings. To light it, Pei capped the hole with a glass pyramid 21.6 meters high, its walls set at 51.52 degrees to echo the Great Pyramid of Giza, with 673 panes held in a web of tensioned cables and rods borrowed from sailboat rigging. The engineering came from Nicolet Chartrand Knoll of Montreal and Rice Francis Ritchie of Paris.

Paris hated it. Critics called it a tomb and an Egyptian death symbol, attacked it as Pharaoh François's vanity project, questioned whether a Chinese-American outsider could touch a French landmark, and the writer Alexander Cockburn painted the lobby as a venue for elite cocktail parties. Then a construction brochure misprinted the pane count as 666, twice, and the error grew into a satanic conspiracy that The Da Vinci Code revived in 2003. The pyramid won anyway. It drew so many people that attendance climbed from about 4.5 million a year to over 9 million by 2014, forcing a three-year redesign of the very lobby it was built to serve.

• The true count of 673 panes: 603 rhombus-shaped and 70 triangular, with no number ever specified by Mitterrand
• A 20-foot pyramid raised opposite the Louvre in 1605 and quickly torn down after Jesuits objected to its inscription
• The black-draped wooden pyramid put up in front of the Louvre in 1839 to commemorate the July Revolution
• Pei's other glass pyramids, from the National Gallery in Washington in 1978 to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995
• How the Eiffel Tower's own hostile reception fits the pattern of Paris rejecting its future icons