Design: Pei's Pyramid Perplexes Paris

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To have the necessary dignity and grandeur, an entrance hall requires daylight. It also requires a marker, a visible symbol. Says Pei: "You can't just walk down as into a subway. The Louvre needs something prestigious." The idea of putting glass over the entrance took care of the daylight, but the glass needed a shape.

Pei and his designers tried transparent cubes, domes and pyramids; they finally settled on the pyramid form because it would be distinctive and yet would not clash with the classic lines of the old building. The proportions of the pyramid (modeled after the famous Egyptian pyramid at Giza) would make it two-thirds the height of the Louvre's façade. Computer-generated graphics commissioned by Pei indicated that the glass structure would be barely visible to visitors approaching the Louvre from the Champs Elysée and quite unobtrusive even from the Louvre's Tuileries Gardens.

This has not kept the arguments from raging on. The newspaper Le Figaro is continuing a three-week-old survey tallying the views of its readers for and against Pei's plan (some 90% favor the renovation but oppose the pyramid, says the paper).

The government has announced that a model of the project will be put on public view at an exposition in April. The model may give Parisians the impression of being consulted about changes in their revered museum, but in fact there is little likelihood that Mitterrand will reconsider his go-ahead for the plan. French Presidents, like kings and emperors before them, frequently exercise their power on behalf of the greater glory of Paris (and thereby their own image). Mitterrand seems clearly determined to follow in the tradition, pyramid and all. Says Emile Biasini, the civil servant who headed Mitterrand's task force on the project: "People are shocked now because they are always shocked by something new. But in ten years they would be shocked if we decided to move it." —By Wolf VonEckardt.

Reported by Harriet Welty/Paris