Boutiques in a Bastion of Culture

By SCOTT KRAFT, Paris

Oct. 10, 1993 12 AM PT

The Louvre has seen plenty of construction engineers in the eight centuries since Philippe Auguste created it as a fortress on the banks of the Seine. George V, who lived here in the 14th Century, did some building. So did Henri IV, Louis XIII, Louis XIV, Napoleon I and Napoleon III.

In all that time, though, through all those expansions, no one ever managed to build a shopping mall--until now. In formerly uncharted territory beneath the famous Louvre Museum, a group of private investors has built Le Carrousel du Louvre, a $100-million shopping and convention complex.

The mall, which officially opens this month, will feature 60 shops, including Paris’ second branch of the Virgin Megastore, loaded with compact discs, albums and videotapes, as well as a four-room “event complex” for conferences, exhibits and fashion shows.

Boutiques will sell everything from Italian ties to cosmetics, and the shopping complex will include a bank, a currency exchange and a pharmacy. For traditionalist French diners, the mall will offer two sit-down restaurants, one French and one Italian. But it also will have, for the first time in Paris, a “food court,” similar to American malls, with 13 fast-food restaurants ringing a 650-seat central dining area.

The centerpiece of the otherwise windowless mall is a 450-ton inverted glass pyramid designed by I. M. Pei, creator of the Grand Pyramid, located above ground in the Louvre’s Cour Napoleon a few steps away. And a sophisticated system of cross-beam lighting will give the mall an atmosphere “close to that of natural light,” say the mall’s publicists.

The opening of the mall roughly coincides with the Nov. 18 debut of the Louvre Museum’s refurbished reception area and new Richlieu wing, which will double the museum’s exhibition space.

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Scott Kraft

Scott Kraft is editor at large for enterprise journalism and special projects at the Los Angeles Times, where he oversees the Investigations department, standards and practices, polling and survey research projects, and newsroom-wide reporting initiatives. He works closely with departments across the newsroom to elevate series and is leading an initiative to actively develop books that are an outgrowth of Times’ expertise and original reporting, in partnership with commercial book publishers. During nearly four decades at The Times, Kraft has been managing editor, deputy managing editor/news and national editor, as well as a foreign and national correspondent. As an editor, he has directed work that won nine Pulitzer Prizes. As a reporter, he was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in feature writing while a New York-based national correspondent for the Associated Press before joining The Times in its Chicago bureau. He spent a decade abroad as The Times’ bureau chief in Nairobi, Johannesburg and Paris. He covered the release of Nelson Mandela and the end of apartheid as well as the ill-fated U.S. military mission in Somalia, among other major stories. His story for the Los Angeles Times magazine on the AIDS epidemic in Africa won the SPJ Distinguished Service Award for Foreign Correspondence. He has served as both a juror and chair of the Selden Ring Award for Investigative Reporting. He also was a Pulitzer Prize juror in international reporting in 2014 and subsequently chaired five Pulitzer juries – Public Service in 2015, International Reporting in 2020, Explanatory Reporting in 2021, Illustrated Reporting and Commentary in 2022 and Editorial Writing in 2023. He is currently president of the Overseas Press Club of America. Kraft was born in Kansas City, Mo., and has a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Kansas State University.

Boutiques in a Bastion of Culture

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