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Comment by khawkins | Hacker News Reader

The Louvre pyramid itself is a beautiful structure and it is certainly a sight to see.

That being said, its placement in a courtyard surrounded by strikingly beautiful and unique French Renaissance architecture is a testament to modern arrogance. It does not complement the theme or contribute to the panorama, but instead steals the view and obscures the art already there. It was highly controversial and divided Parisians against each other. Clearly the man had talent, but it's a little disgusting how proud of where it was placed.

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These matters of taste are subjective, and the more someone believes in the righteousness of a given aesthetic opinion, the less you should listen to them regarding matters of culture.

Controversy is difficult to quantify. But millions of people cheerfully photograph themselves together with the pyramid each year, which leads me to believe that those who smile seeing this building far outnumber those who scoff and yearn for the "striking beauty" of the brutal, decadent monarchy that built the original Louvre palaces in order to project dominance.

We live after the end of aesthetic teleology. There is no more objectively defensible aesthetic criteria. There is only a morass of yawning subjectivity, and hopefully a critical perspective regarding the ways and reasons that power utilizes the sort of rhetoric you perform here.

> There is no more objectively defensible aesthetic criteria

Oh, come now. There are lots of designs everyone would agree are objectively ugly. But they rarely get built these days. So if it seems like everything is subjective, it's because everything we see has passed the not-objectively-ugly filter.

There are entire schools of designers devoted to producing work that contradicts popular taste, and cultural consensus around design changes super fast. There is also a huge gap between the taste of elite practitioners and the general public.

Comme des Garçons is one of the most ubiquitously respected fashion houses, and the legendary designer who heads it had a show at The Met recently. Here is a look from their couture runway this year:

https://images.app.goo.gl/iWJXmpQDg5tQZSUz8

You could poll 20 HN readers and ask “is this objectively ugly?” And you might find total consensus. But almost everyone who devotes their life to the field of fashion design would at least grant that this look is typical of the style that made Comme so important, and would certainly deny any kind of “objective” characterization of it as ugly. Many, many brilliant, highly educated people would say it is beautiful.

There is no fact of the matter. People liking IM Pei’s pyramid doesn’t prove it’s beautiful any more than people hating certain critically respected brutalist buildings proves they’re ugly. There are no intrinsically ugly buildings.

With just about anything, with time you get used to it: be it eyesore, noise pollution, bad relationship. You let it be, after a while. With regards to photos, it’s neither here nor there. People will take photos of anything. If it were a big pile of cow dung in the middle there, people would still photograph it.

I’m indifferent to it, personally. De mortis nil nisi bonum.

I tend to agree with the obituary described about what I.M. Pei's explanation:

  He argued that his glass pyramid was merely an updated 
  version of a traditional form, and that his redesigned 
  courtyard had been influenced by the geometric work of the 
  French landscape architect Le Notre. It was rigorously 
  rational, in other words, and in that sense classically 
  French.

> but it's a little disgusting how proud of where it was placed.

Also, I.M. Pei himself considered JFK Library the most important commission of his life[1], not the Louvre Pyramid. What he merely said was he didn't think he made a wrong choice in designing the glass pyramid. And there were quite a bit of background info and context in his choice in the wikipedia article.[2]

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I._M._Pei#/media/File:JFK_libr...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I._M._Pei#Le_Grand_Louvre,_Par...

The explanation is fine by itself, however Le Notre did the Versailles gardens and they look good and are in harmony with their surroundings. The Louvre pyramid is ugly and is in disharmony, which defeats the purpose of architecture. The explanation makes it feel like an even bigger failure somehow.

The louvre was not built in one go, but continually augmented and remodeled over the last 900 years or so. To me the pyramid is just another step in the process.

It's very recognizable. Whenever I see a picture of it, I know it is the Louvre in Paris. I doubt I would recognize the other buildings.

Looking at Google image search for "Paris", my suspicion is confirmed that the pyramid is almost the second most recognizable building in Paris now.

Merely imitating the old style of the surrounding buildings would have been phony, in my opinion.

That’s what I thought. I snickered at the label on the header image:

> “If there’s one thing I know I didn’t do wrong, it’s the Louvre,”.

The scar on the face of Paris.

That’s a laughable statement not shared by many Parisians.

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