Museum of Art in New York was the second most visited art museum, while museums in London took third, fourth and fifth place.
Since this poll began in 2007, the Louvre has always topped the list. People go to the Louvre not just to see the Mona Lisa, but a vast array of other works of art; the total collection is just mind boggling. The Louvre also has a habit of coming up with new delights, such as I. M. Pei’s glass pyramid, inauguarated in 1989 amid protestations of shock and horror. It has since become an accepted part of the landscape in the Louvre.
The new wing of Islamic art has also created something very new and worthwhile for visitors; it has a dramatic roof that looks like a flying carpet. It's considered the biggest collection of Islamic art in Europe. It has about 3,000 objects on show in its gallery, such as mosaics from the Damascus mosque and a delicately carved ivory box dating from 928. Altogether,the Louvre has 18,000 pieces of Islamic art in its collection. One of the key backers for the project was former French president Jacques Chirac, a constant advocate of cultural dialogue between the West and the Muslim world. The biggest single donor to the new wing was a Saudi Arabian prince, Alwaleel bin Talal bin Abdulaziz al-Saud, who gave €17 million, while the French government provided most of the funding.
In terms of new architecture, you don’t just have to go to the Louvre in Paris. The city has many other fine examples of modern design. The oldest is the Maison de Verre in the 7th, built between 1928 and 1931, an outstanding example of early 20th century modern design using glass. There’s one
very odd facet to this building. When an old building on the site was purchased, to make way for the new block, an elderly tenant on the top floor refused to budge, so the Maison de Verre had to be built below the level of the old top floor. Very odd, but typical French obstinacy!
Then at the end of the 1950s, the renowned architect Le Corbusier (1887-1965) designed the
Maison de Brésil in the 14th; it’s now a World Heritage site. In recent decades, astonishing new buildings have come along at a great pace. The Institut du Monde Arabe in the 5th is a landmark building that promotes the cultural and spiritual values of the Arab world and it incorporates many features of Islamic design into its structure. A then young and up and coming architect called Jean
Nouvel was very involved in its design. In much more recent times, the mature Jean Nouvel has created the Musée de la Quai Branly, very close to the Eiffel tower.
The very concept of the museum has created much controversy, since it contains nearly 300,000 objects representing indigenous art and culture from Africa, the Americas, Asia and Oceania. But Jean Nouvel’s design for the museum is indeed striking and it’s worth going to have a look just at
the exterior, before you step inside.
French presidents have long had the idea of getting ambitious building projects up and running in Paris, to leave monumental works behind them, long after they have departed from office. Francois Mitterand had an especial eye on his legacy and one of his creations was the new national library in the 13th. The new blocks of this library, with their vast expanses of glass, had huge cost overruns during construction, so much so that the place became known as the very big library, a
play on the name of the very fast train, the TGV. Its design also showed a certain lack of practicality. No-one thought of including blinds for the windows, to stop the sun beating in on the books inside.
The Grande Arche at La Defénse, to the immediate west of the city, is also a striking edifice and from it you can see straight down the Champs-Elysées to the Tuileries gardens. An earlier presidential creation was the Pompidou Centre in the 4th, with its inside on the outside design and much refurbished since it first opened in 1977. It also has a new “wing”, at Metz. Finally, among this
plethora of new buildings in Paris, don’t miss the Cité de Science in the 19th, the biggest science museum in Europe, with a vast array of very imaginatively designed speciality centres within the whole complex.
Paris presents a great contradiction; on one hand, many citizens are aghast at anything being done to tamper with the great historical buildings and landscapes in the city. Yet on the other hand, Paris is a great place to see some really exciting new architectural work, that is visually stimulating, rather
than merely banal, which seems the curse of much modern architecture. Dublin is littered with totally banal and boring modern buildings that show not a hint of design originality.
The latest spot in Paris to undergo regeneration, according to the BBC Travel website, is the Pigalle district of northern Paris, for so long renowned for its sleazy sex clubs and even a museum
on the subject. Now it seems that south Pigalle is becoming one of the hottest places in Paris for an entirely different reason: in the past two or three years, some really hip bars and entertainment places have opened, starting at the end of 2010,when Le Carmen opened in what had once been the home of the composer Bizet. One of the latest openings is the Dirty Dick bar, a name that’s a tongue in
cheek reference to the sordid goings on elsewhere in Pigalle.
But one thing never changes in Paris as in the rest of France, this incredible French obsession with time-consuming bureaucratic meddling. Lara Marlowe is the American journalist who has recently returned to Paris to become for the second time, the Paris correspondent of The Irish Times. She had spent from 2009 to 2012 in Washington as that paper’s correspondent there and was clearly delighted to get back to Paris. But she has described the mind-numbing ordeal of having to go through so many bureaucratic hoops in Paris as she set up her new home there. As the headline on the piece said, so pithily: "The magic of living in Paris punctures the endless pain of French bureaucracy”. Why the French have this incredible and perverse love of byzantine bureaucracy, I’m not quite sure, but only a Frenchman could have invented the concept of VAT. And incidentally, Lara Marlowe was once married to Robert Fisk, the veteran Lebanon-based correspondent, long renowned as the best-informed western correspondent writing about the Middle East.
At the moment of course, Paris should be utterly delightful in the spring, but it isn’t. Like
most of the rest of Europe, northern France and Paris has endured some of the worst weather of all time during the month of March and it continues now that April has been ushered in. In fact, it’s been the coldest March in France since 1987 and you’d have to go back to the weather records of 1970, 1962 and 1955 to find equally low temperatures. The forecast for the coming week is that the north
is going to continue cold, with some snow,spreading down into middle France, while the south is going to have a lot more rain. This is exactly what has been happening in Spain, absolute deluges of rain. On Monday, in the region of Castille-la-Mancha, in the south of Spain, the rains caused a bridge over a local river to collapse, throwing a car and a truck into the water and killing the two
drivers. We can only hope that this awful weather simply can’t last for ever; I’ve a funny feeling that in recompense, we’re probably going to get a scorching hot summer. And hot summers in Paris are really something!