Louvre announces architects for expansion that will include new Mona Lisa space

PARIS – The Louvre announced Monday it had selected a team of French, German and American architects to design its ambitious expansion project, which will transform one of the world’s foremost museums but has faced mounting criticism because of its cost.

The design calls for a grand second public entrance to ease overcrowding and expand the Louvre’s capacity by 3 million visitors a year, as well as new exhibition space that would allow the crowds to see the Paris museum’s masterpiece, Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, while skipping the rest of its collection.

Studios Architecture Paris, the French branch of an international firm founded in San Francisco, and Selldorf Architects, a New York-based firm led by German-born architect Annabelle Selldorf, were selected from a shortlist of five competitors, according to French Culture Minister Catherine Pégard.

Pégard said in a statement that the design proposed by the winning firms was “respectful and contemporary” and would create “an elegant connection between the city, the palace and the museum.”

The winning architecture firm was supposed to be announced several months ago, before the daylight heist of priceless crown jewels, which are still missing, brought the process to a halt.

More mishaps followed: A water leak damaged a library. A gallery had to be closed because its beams were found to be unsound. A vast ticket fraud scheme that is suspected of having involved two Louvre agents was exposed. And part of the museum’s staff repeatedly went on strike.

When former museum director Laurence des Cars first presented the project in January 2025, she told French newspaper Le Monde the new entrance and exhibition space would cost about 270 million euros, or about $316 million.

But France’s national auditing authority estimated that it was more likely to cost 1.1 billion euros. It cast doubt on the feasibility of the broader project, which also includes a plan to fortify the museum’s security and renovate its deteriorating structure.

The project would be Louvre’s biggest transformation since the monumental glass pyramid designed by Chinese American architect I.M. Pei, which became the main entrance to the palace in 1989.

But the pyramid, which is designed to handle 4 million visitors a year, has become a congested bottleneck as that number has more than doubled.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.