Grand Louvre

The Grand Louvre was a decade-long renovation and expansion of the Louvre Museum in Paris, begun in 1981 at the initiative of French President Francois Mitterrand. The project relocated the French Finance Ministry out of the museum's northern wing and rebuilt the Richelieu, Sully and Denon wings, adding an underground lobby, the Hall Napoleon, and the Carrousel du Louvre shopping complex beneath an inverted glass pyramid. Its best known feature is the glass pyramid entrance designed by the architect I. M. Pei, initially controversial but since embraced as a landmark. The work tripled the museum's overall area from about 57,000 to nearly 180,000 square meters, nearly doubled its exhibition space, raised the number of objects on display from about 20,600 to more than 34,000, and helped annual visitors grow from roughly 2.8 million in the 1980s to more than 5 million by the early 2000s, at a total cost of more than one billion euros. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/