Louvre picks architects for overhaul to ease overcrowding, add new Mona Lisa space
The Louvre chose architects for a major overhaul built around crowd control, a new entrance and a separate Mona Lisa space with its own ticket.
The Louvre’s latest overhaul is about more than stone, glass and circulation plans. By carving out a dedicated Mona Lisa gallery under the Cour Carrée, the museum is betting that the world’s most visited painting can be managed like a traffic problem without turning the rest of the palace into a bottleneck.
A French and German team of architects has been selected to advance the project, which is expected to add capacity for about 3 million more visitors a year. The plan sits inside the broader Louvre - Nouvelle Renaissance renovation announced by President Emmanuel Macron on January 28, 2025, after director Laurence des Cars warned in a leaked memo that the museum was suffering from leaks, overcrowding and other signs of decay.
The redesign is meant to do what the current building strain no longer can: improve visitor flow, strengthen conservation conditions and fix long-running maintenance problems while preserving the historic palace and the I.M. Pei pyramid entrance. A new entrance is part of the proposal, along with a separate Mona Lisa space that the Louvre has said will not sit inside the museum’s main admission route. Visitors who want to see the painting will need a separate ticket and timed access, a change that underscores how completely the museum’s operations now revolve around one work.
The pressure on the institution is already visible in the numbers. The Louvre welcomed 8.7 million visitors in 2024, nearly matching its 2023 attendance of 8.9 million. Staff members have said that popularity has come at a cost, and in June 2025 workers staged a protest closure over overcrowded galleries and worsening visiting conditions. That unrest made clear that the debate is not just about comfort for tourists; it is also about labor, safety and the limits of a building that was not designed for this scale of daily use.
The competition to design the expansion drew more than 100 architectural teams, according to the French Ministry of Culture, before five finalist groups were chosen for the first phase in October 2025. The Louvre’s selection of an architectural team now moves the project from ambition to execution, but the central question remains whether the museum can improve the experience for millions of visitors without reducing its own identity to a carefully managed corridor built around the same masterpiece.
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