Page "Musée du Louvre" Paragraph 22

After architects Mario Bellini and Rudy Ricciotti had won an international competition to create its new galleries for Islamic art, the new 3, 000 sq m pavilion eventually opened in 2012, consisting of ground-and lower-ground-level interior spaces topped by a golden, undulating roof ( fashioned from almost 9, 000 steel tubes that form an interior web ) that seems to float within the neo-Classical Visconti Courtyard in the middle of the Louvre ’ s south wing.

The galleries, which the museum had initially hoped to open by 2009, represent the first major architectural intervention at the Louvre since the addition of I. M.

Pei ’ s glass pyramid in 1989.