Post pics of yourselves!

[lkfmdc]

you guys don't know nothing, at the bottom of that glass pyramid is the last resting place of Mary, and it's protected by the priory

[SPJ]

is that in the movie or the book

da vin ci code.

banned by the church.

since it is about the blood line of Jesus's childern and grand children---

[SPJ]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s37yJ...eature=related

[David Jamieson]

There is an inverted pyramid from the roof in the sub basement of the Louvre and yes, the point of the inverted pyramid meets with a stone pyramid rising from the floor about 5 feet or so.

As far as I know, there is no grave beneath that.

It's an art museum though and it has some of the oldest artifacts in the world in it.
Not to mention the paintings! Oh, the paintings.

Anyway, yes it was the Palace of the Sun King Louis the 14th (Je suis L'etat / I am the state) and sits at the end of the Place Concorde where you can gaze straight down the Champs Elysee directly at Napoleon's arch of triumph.

If you ever get a chance to spend a day or two at the Louvre, I would encourage you to do so. It is a treasure of the world, not just France.

[Hardwork108]

Yes yes, a French castle turned art museum with an entrance designed to look like ancient Egyptian pyramids and designed by a Chinaman. They're coming for you now....

Actually, the pyramid was the idea of an ex-French president who was a Freemason. Makes you wonder.......

[Hardwork108]

is that in the movie or the book

da vin ci code.

banned by the church.

since it is about the blood line of Jesus's childern and grand children---

How can someone who probably never existed have a bloodline?

Some say that the bloodline story is just more symbolism, created by people who know that most of that story is balloney.....

[Hardwork108]

you guys don't know nothing, at the bottom of that glass pyramid is the last resting place of Mary, and it's protected by the priory

You can pretend and disguise the facts all you want, but we know that the pyramid is actually the location of your new European venture, the Paris San Duh!

[KC Elbows]

You can pretend and disguise the facts all you want, but we know that the pyramid is actually the location of your new European venture, the Paris San Duh!

At the lost bloodline of Jesus Paris San da academy, you sew what you shall reap.

[David Jamieson]

At the lost bloodline of Jesus Paris San da academy, you sew what you shall reap.

also, you shall do unto others...

[SoCo KungFu]

Actually, the pyramid was the idea of an ex-French president who was a Freemason. Makes you wonder.......

ACTUALLY, no. Mitterrand simply requested remodeling. It was Pei's idea.

In 1983, President François Mitterrand requested that it be modernized, expanded and better integrated with the city — all without compromising the integrity of the historic building. The challenge was magnified by the fact that the Louvre was originally constructed, and used for most of its life, as a royal palace; it was fundamentally ill-suited to serve as a museum.

The two-phase solution involved the reorganization of the long linear building into a compact U-shaped museum around a focal courtyard. A centrally located glass pyramid forms the new main entrance and provides direct access to galleries in each of the museum's three wings. Critically, the pyramid also serves as a skylight for a very large expansion building constructed under the courtyard to provide all the public amenities and technical support required in a modern museum.

"The center of gravity of the museum had to be in the Cour Napoleon," Pei said. "That's where the public had to come. But what do you do when you arrive? Do you enter into an underground space, a kind of subway concourse? No. You need to be welcomed by some kind of great space. So you've got to have something of our period. That space must have volume, it must have light and it must have a surface identification. You have to be able to look at it and say, `Ah, this is the entrance.'"

Pei's solution was a 70-foot glass pyramid capable, in theory, of ingesting 15,000 visitors an hour. He based its proportions on the classic Egyptian pyramid at Giza and surrounded it with a trio of baby "pyramidons" and three triangular reflecting pools with fountains.

Pei offered his "luminous structure-symbol" as an ingenious way to avoid upstaging the Louvre. No solid addition imaginable could gracefully blend with the time-darkened old palace, he reasoned, but a translucent pyramid, frankly of its own time, would repectfully defer to the heavy presence of the sorrounding building by reflecting this tawny stone.

The pyramid is the geometric shape that encloses the greatest area within the smallest possible volume, so it would stand as unobtrusively as possible. It was, Pei assured them, "a natural solution." There was one more pleasing twist: the ancient form made of high-tech material would be at once much older and much newer than the Louvre.

This was not Pei's first pyramid. He had already used a cluster of glass pyramids to light an underground corridor connecting Washington's national Gallary with his modern addition Before that he had drafted a truncated glass pyramid for an abortive design for the Kennedy Libray in Cambridge, Massachusetts. "It would be very embarrassing," observed the architectural historian Robert Clark of Princeton, "if the French government found out that what they had was really a warmed-over JFK memorial."

Nonetheless, Pei's pyramid fit the strict geometric spirit of Le Notre. It would align with other abstract landmarks - the Arc de Triomphe and the obelisk in the Place de la Concorde - ornamenting the splended vista that sweeps from the Louvre through the Luileries and continues up the Champs-Elysees in one unbroken line to the Place de l'Etoile and, by implication, to the setting sun in the west.

Moreover, the pyramid appears through French history: in seventeenth-century topiaries, in the tip of the obelisk that stands in the Place de la Concorde and in the visionary gatewys, factories and crematoriums conjured up by eighteenth-century architects Etienne-Louis Boullee and Claude-Nicolas Ledoux. There is, in fact, a Place des Pyramides just off the Louvre's northern flank.

When Olivier Bernier asked if he had drawn inspiration from Ledoux's unbuilt designer, Pei looked at him "with great indignation," Bernier recalled "and he said, `That had nothing to do with it!'" Pei curously disavowed any debt to historical precedent. He selected the pyramid, he insisted, by sheer analysis. (Michael T. Cannell, "I.M. Pei: Mandarin of Modernism", 1995)

[Hardwork108]

ACTUALLY, no. Mitterrand simply requested remodeling. It was Pei's idea.

Interesting cover story. You didn't expect them to publish the real reason for the symbolism, did you?

Also, keep in mind that the last word may have been Mitterand's, no matter whose idea it was. It would be good to know wether or not Pei was a Freemason or not.

[Kansuke]

@ feeble-minded conspiracy nuts

[TenTigers]

HW-have you been travelling lately?

[Dragonzbane76]

HW-have you been travelling lately?

he needs a trip to the looney bin.

[David Jamieson]

HW-have you been travelling lately?

I don't believe him to be a widow's son. In fact I would be surprised if he was a traveling man.