Louvre readies to open new Islamic wing

Any insurance underwriters here? What would the actuarial tables on the survivability of this building over say, 3 years be?

From The Local.Fr.

With a roof designed to look like a floating sheet of silk, a reference to the Islamic headscarf, a new wing of the Louvre housing Islamic art is nearing completion.

The project to house the Paris museum’s well regarded collection of Islamic objects was launched by former president Jacques Chirac in 2002.

Six years later his successor, Nicolas Sarkozy, laid the first stone. After four years of construction, the wing is set to open in the summer.

On Wednesday, the Louvre’s director, Henri Loyette, gave an update on the progress of the building, which is due to open in the summer.

He said the new addition to the museum would put on show “collections that have been largely neglected for 25 years.”

The building’s architect Mario Bellini, who has designed the structure with Rudy Ricciotti, told the BBC the structure should seem as if it is “floating in mid-air.”

“The roof is only supported by eight very narrow tubes which are leaning and dancing together and which support the weight of the veil to the bottom of the foundations,” he said.

The 3,500 square metre space is the museum’s biggest project since the construction of the glass pyramid that sits in the Louvre’s main courtyard twenty years ago.

The €98 million ($126 million) new wing will sit in one of the Louvre’s hidden courtyards in the Denon wing of the gallery and can house around 18,000 works.

In 2011, the Louvre attracted a record 8.8 million visits, with around two-thirds coming from outside France.

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About Eeyore

Canadian artist and counter-jihad and freedom of speech activist as well as devout Schrödinger's catholic

4 Replies to “Louvre readies to open new Islamic wing”

  1. Mahoundian art… Mosaics, calligraphy, and that’s about it… Mahoundians could never have developed painting and sculpture like the masters of the Renaissance, or musical notation, or even literature (since that so-called “Arabian” nights would be more accurately described as Persian and Hindu Nights.)

    So, why dedicate any space at all at the Louvre to that???

  2. Pislamic art is pure crap. Why waste any space on it? How long before all wings will be pislamic and Mona Lisa and all the other paintings are ashes?

  3. Robin:

    My guess is the Islamic wing will get destroyed first. They will blame counter-jihad groups and a month or so later when no one remembers, they will reveal that it was a ‘radical’ Islamic group that objects to any kind of representational art (if there is any there) and that somehow the wing is a blasphemy like every other smeging thing is to Islam.