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It was once decried as an architectural

"obscenity", but as the Louvre's glass pyramid turns 30 on Friday, it

has become a cherished icon of the French capital, AFP reported.

One eminent writer called for revolt in the streets when

French president Francois Mitterrand's flamboyant culture minister Jack Lang

first unveiled the plans for what is now regarded as Chinese-American architect

I. M. Pei's masterpiece.

Plonking a modernist pyramid into the center of a

Renaissance palace was considered sacrilege, with one satirical magazine

calling it a tomb and joking that Mitterrand – who was suffering from cancer –

"wants to be the first pharaoh in our history".

Pei – who will be 102 next month – remembers "receiving

many angry glances in the streets", with up to 90 percent of Parisians

said to be against the project at one point.

Yet in the end, even that stern critic of modernist

"carbuncles", Britain's Prince Charles, pronounced it "marvelous".

Over the next few days, JR, one of the world's most famous

street artists, will create a huge collage with the help of 400 volunteers to

celebrate its 30th birthday by revealing "the Secret of the Grand

Pyramid".

Masterstroke

The sphinx-like Mitterrand, who had embarked on a string of

grand projects to transform the French capital, hedged his bets from the start.

"It's a good idea, but like all good ideas it is

difficult to do," the wily old Socialist leader had warned Lang.

A whole wing of the Louvre was then occupied by the French

ministry of finance, which held the purse strings of the state, and would be

difficult to budge.

The museum's huge "Napoleon Courtyard was an appalling

car park," Lang told AFP. "The museum was handicapped by the lack of

a central entrance."

Pei's masterstroke was to link the three wings of the

world's most visited museum with vast underground galleries bathed in light

from his glass and steel pyramid.

Such was his success that the conservative French daily Le

Figaro, which had led the campaign against his "atrocious" design for

years, celebrated his genius with a supplement on the 10th anniversary of the

pyramid's opening in 1999.

Pei, who grew up in Hong Kong and Shanghai, was not the

obvious choice for the job, having never worked on a historic building before.

But Mitterrand was so impressed with his modernist extension

to the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC that he insisted he was the man

for the Louvre.

Already in his mid-60s when the project began, nothing had

prepared Pei for the hostility his plans would receive.

He needed all his tact and dry humor to survive a series of

encounters with planning officials and historians.

'You're not in Dallas now'

One meeting with the French historic monuments commission in

January 1984 ended in uproar, with Pei unable even to present his ideas.

"You are not in Dallas now!" one of the experts

shouted at him during the "terrible session", where he felt the

target of anti-Chinese racism.

Not even Pei's winning of the Pritzker Prize, the

"Nobel of architecture" in 1983, assuaged his detractors.

Lang told AFP he is still "surprised by the violence of

the opposition" to Pei's ideas.

"The pyramid is right at the center of a monument

central to the history of France (the Louvre is the former palace of the

country's kings.)"

The Louvre's then director, Andre Chabaud, resigned in 1983

in protest at the "architectural risks" Pei's vision posed.

The present incumbent, however, is in no doubt that the

pyramid helped turn the museum around.

Jean-Luc Martinez is all the more convinced having worked

with Pei in recent years to adapt his plans to cope with the museum's growing

popularity.

Pei's original design was for up to two million visitors a

year. Last year the Louvre welcomed more than 10 million.

"The Louvre is the only museum in the world whose

entrance is a work of art," Martinez insisted.

The pyramid is "the modern symbol of the museum",

he said, "an icon on the same level" as the Louvre's most revered

artworks such as the "Mona Lisa" or the "Venus de Milo".

Pei is not alone in being savaged for changing the cherished

landscape of Paris.

In 1887, a group of intellectuals that included Emile Zola

and Guy de Maupassant published a letter in the newspaper Le Temps to protest

the building of the "useless and monstrous Eiffel Tower", an

"odious column of sheet metal with bolts."