The Louvre museum, located inside the Louvre Palace, in the center of Paris, adjacent to the Tuileries Gardens, is the largest museum in the world in terms of the floor area of its exhibition space (72,735 m²). It opened to the public on 10 August 1793 with an exhibition of 537 paintings, the majority of the works being royal and confiscated church property.

Before the Grand Louvre overhaul of the late 1980s and 1990s, the Louvre had several street-level entrances, most of which are now permanently closed. Since 1993, the museum's main entrance has been the underground space under the Louvre Pyramid, or Hall Napoléon (pictured in the accompanying video), which can be accessed from the Pyramid itself.

The Grand Louvre project was announced in 1981 by François Mitterrand, the President of France, and the Louvre Pyramid was its centerpiece. The pyramid and the underground lobby beneath it were created because of deficiencies with the Louvre's earlier layout, which could no longer handle the increasing number of visitors on an everyday basis. Visitors entering through the pyramid descend into the spacious lobby then ascend into the main Louvre buildings.

The Grand Louvre project also created another world right under the Louvre Museum — a shopping mall that is entirely underground, called the Carrousel du Louvre, centred on the Inverted Pyramid glass sculpure — which has a large, upturned base, that could be easily viewed from outside. This shopping mall opened on the 15 October 1993.

The Grand Louvre project also included the Louvre Inverted Pyramid, which essentially acts as a skylight for the shopping mall below. The main pyramid has a square base of 35.4m and a height of 21.6m, while the inverted one has a square base of 15.5m and a height of just 7m. Underground, a small stone pyramid, mirroring the larger inverted glass pyramid above, is a stands about 1 metre tall. The tips of the stone pyramid and the larger inverted glass one almost touch, they are only about 40cm apart.

The construction of the glass pyramids triggered many years of lively aesthetic and political debate. Those criticizing the aesthetics said it was sacrilegious to tamper with the Louvre's majestic old French Renaissance architecture, and called the pyramid an anachronistic intrusion of an Egyptian death symbol in the middle of Paris.