I. M. Pei: When the Pyramid Was Accused of Insulting History

On a Parisian night the Louvre Palace summons I. M. Pei before the Court of History, where Stone sits on the bench with the centuries behind it as silent witnesses, and the dossier of Paris charges that his pyramid is foreign, too modern and will cut the face of history with glass. Pei answers that he is defending a path, a heart that can join the museum's wings for visitors lost among its entrances, and explains the pyramid as weight becoming direction, standing on the earth with its whole body and rising toward its apex. The old façade fears becoming invisible, so he shows a sheet of glass so clear it seems not to exist, and the Pyramid, entering the court before it is built, calls itself the entrance that will at the start seem a crime, then become familiar, then become memory. Sentenced to build beneath the earth, Pei digs under the courtyard a hidden heart that distributes visitors through the palace, and on opening day visitor after visitor descends until Paris enters through the doorway it rejected. The book ends with Stone and Glass facing each other without a judge, and with architecture defined as creating between ages a place where humanity can stand.