Following a first round this June, which attracted over 100 entrants, the 21-strong jury for the competition “Louvre—Nouvelle Renaissance” announced its five finalists on October 10. Part of a wider, €500 million renovation of Paris’s Musée du Louvre, whose layout and obsolescing systems can no longer cope with almost 9 million annual visitors, the competition calls for a new public entrance on the building’s east front and new spaces beneath the Cour Carrée behind it. Budgeted at €270 million, the scheme is intended to make visitor flows more fluid, easing the strain on I.M. Pei’s 1989 pyramid (dimensioned to handle just 4 million annual visitors) as well the building’s Denon wing, currently home to the Mona Lisa. After the revamp, the most-visited artwork in the world’s most-visited museum will take up residence in its own special underground gallery.

Two American-based firms feature among the finalists: Selldorf Architects, which has teamed up with the Paris branch of STUDIOS Architecture and French landscape designers BASE; and Diller Scofidio + Renfro in association, among others, with French firm Architecture Studio and Paris-based landscape designers TER. Great Britain’s AL_A, headed by Amanda Levete, is also a finalist, in a team of French urbanists, landscape designers, and exhibition designers, while Japan is represented by both Sou Fujimoto—which has offices in Tokyo and Paris and is collaborating with a French exhibition designer and landscape firm—and SANAA, which has teamed up with French office Dubuisson and British landscape designers Dan Pearson Studio. The jury—which includes Franco-Lebanese architect Lina Ghotmeh, who is currently working on the British Museum’s Western Range redevelopment; French architect and Académie des Beaux-Arts-member Bernard Desmoulin, designer of the visitor center at Paris’s Musée de Cluny; and Li Chung Pei, son of the late Ieoh Ming—will deliver its verdict early next year.