French officials chose an international team of architects to usher the Louvre into a "new Renaissance," with an overhaul that may add up to $1 billion, aimed at addressing crowd control, security and infrastructure needs at the world's busiest art museum.
Selldorf Architects, a New York-based firm, will team with Studios Architecture Paris to lead an ambitious renovation and expansion, the French Ministry of Culture announced this week. The architects were chosen from a group of five finalists selected in October from a pool of more than 100 applicants.
The winning design is "respectful and contemporary" and will create "an elegant connection between the city, the palace and the museum," Catherine Pégard, France's minister of culture, says in a statement, per Mark Landler for the New York Times.
The project centers on a redesign of the plaza at the "Grande Colonnade," the museum's eastern facade, which was built in the 17th century in the classical tradition with giant coupled columns.
Pégard highlighted the winning design's envisioned symmetry for this facade, which will feature two new underground entrances, expanded exhibition space, dining areas and gift shops. New pathways and greenery connecting the museum with the rest of Paris aim to solve the museum's growing foot traffic problem by accommodating an estimated three million more visitors per year. The Louvre currently receives about nine million guests a year.
The firm will also be tasked with reimagining the display of the Louvre's most famous painting, Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa. The work, which alone attracts an average of about 20,000 visitors each day, per Le Monde, will receive a custom-built 33,000 square-foot exhibition space. The new gallery will allow people to view the painting without necessarily visiting the rest of the museum, a change that officials hope will further cut down on crowding. Information about Leonardo and the painting's history will help fill the massive room.
Mona Lisa's current gallery is frequently mobbed.
"Every day, this very room is the scene of intense agitation," Laurence des Cars, the museum's former director, said at the press conference last year, according to the Washington Post's Ellen Francis. "Exceptional visitor numbers are not a curse, they're a source of pride. … It's also a challenge to reinvent ourselves and remain faithful to our public service mission."
The Mona Lisa expansion is expected to be completed in 2031, per the Washington Post, and will cost at least hundreds of millions of dollars.