Abu Dhabi staked its claim as the cultural capital of the Middle East on January 8 with the final go-ahead for its most eagerly anticipated landmark project. The main contract for the Louvre Abu Dhabi was awarded to the Dubai builder Arabtec. Construction of the US$ 653 million development will begin immediately and the new museum is expected to open in 2015. The Louvre Abu Dhabi, which arose out of a 2007 cultural partnership between France and the United Arab Emirates, won't look anything like the lavish 12th century building where Louis XIV once lived. The mushroom-shaped building designed by French architect Jean Nouvel, the Pritzker Prize winner, is slated to be part of a cultural district planned for Saadiyat Island. The architecturally stunning complex will consist of 64,000 square meters of pavilions, plazas and canals, two-thirds of it shaded by a 180-meter wide cupola that appears to float in mid air. The new museum will form the heart of the Saadiyat Island cultural district alongside the Zayed National Museum planned to open in 2016 and the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi the following year. The construction challenges are considerable. A 180-metre wide cupola supported at just four points around its perimeter will shade two-thirds of the museum campus. Perforated to cast an intricate "rain of light" below, the dome will be made of more than 100,000 individual elements in 10 layers that will overlap to form a pattern inspired by Islamic geometry and the palm fronds of traditional Arish dwellings. The Louvre Abu Dhabi will be housed in 9,200 square meters of gallery space spread across almost 30 separate buildings. Planned like a town, these range from one to three storey in height and are linked by a network of gardens, plazas and watercourses inspired by traditional Arabian falaj. The scope of the architecture and public areas may sound prodigious, but these pale in comparison to the design, engineering and infrastructure challenges that have been overcome to get the project to this stage. The museum requires a 10-metre deep waterproof basement for emergency access and plant rooms that measure 31,500 square meters. In 2009, walls were buried in the sand 40 meters deep to ensure the construction site stays watertight. Once works are complete, these will be removed to allow seawater to flow between the museum precincts in a series of canals. In 2010 alone, contractors drove 4,536 piles into the ground - 2,958 steel and 1,578 concrete - the length of which, if put end to end, is the distance from Abu Dhabi to Dubai. Most of this work has gone unnoticed. The only visible sign of progress thus far has been a curious, wedge-shaped chamber on Saadiyat in which a 1:33 scaled model of the museum's canopy, made of 15,000 aluminum and steel parts, has been light-tested to ensure its performance. But behind the scenes an international team of architects and engineers has been working for almost five years, testing the dome for factors including its ability to cast the right type of shade, and its resistance to wind, explosions and fire. Most of the preparatory work associated with the Louvre Abu Dhabi is already complete. All that remains is the small matter of delivering the more tangible parts of what will be one of the early 21st century's most anticipated architectural projects.

When I. M. Pei's glass pyramid opened at the Louvre more than 20 years ago, many argued that this 21.3 meters tall structure had destroyed the classical beauty of one of the world's great museums. But today, as crowds wait on long lines outside the pyramid, which serves as the Louvre's main entrance, what once seemed audacious has become as accepted a part of the city's visual landscape as the Eiffel Tower or the Arc de Triomphe. Now the museum is again risking the public's wrath as it introduces the most radical architectural intervention since the pyramid in 1989. Designed to house new galleries for Islamic art, it consists of ground- and lower-ground-level interior spaces topped by a golden, undulating roof that seems to float within the neo-Classical Visconti Courtyard in the middle of the Louvre's south wing, right below the museum's most popular galleries, where the Mona Lisa and Veronese's "Wedding Feast of Cana" are hung. This deftly engineered design is the work of two architects, the Italian Mario Bellini and the Frenchman Rudy Ricciotti, who won an international competition to create the new wing in 2005. Seven years in the making, the US$ 125 million project, which opened on September 22. When the plans were first unveiled, the architects said, the roof resembled "a scarf floating within the space" - a somewhat loaded description, perhaps, considering that last year the French officially banned full veils in public places. The museum's "luminous veil," or "flying carpet" as it has also been called, covers some 2790 square meters of gallery space on the ground and lower floors. The new galleries, roughly four times as large as the space previously devoted to Islamic art at the Louvre, house a collection spanning 1,200 years of history, from the 7th through the 19th centuries, and includes glass works, ceramics, metalwork, books, manuscripts, textiles and carpets. The roof is actually constructed of a free-form lattice composed of 8,000 steel tubes and glass covered by gilded metal. The undulating canopy contains the open floor plan gallery space where objects are displayed in glass cabinets. A large staircase descends to the lower level where natural daylight seeps in around the edges. A significant amount of work for the project required the team to excavate down 12 meters without disturbing the palace's original foundation. The result is a cavernous space reminiscent of a tent illuminated with a soft golden light.

As reported the newspaper Le Figaro, in 2014 Louvre will receive a new building - the museum will get the building of hotel de la Marine in Paris, which is currently the main headquarter of the Fleet Marine Forces. According to director of Louvre Henri Loyrette, the museum has no plans to move one of its departments or part of its collection to the new building. There will be exposed collections from other museums or institutions. The building total area is about 22 thousand square meters, 3 thousand of which have been already restored. The whole restoration project is estimated US$ 65-105 million (50-80 million euros). It is assumed that de la Marine hotel will become an important cultural center, where will also be held lectures and seminars. In one part of the building will house the Court of Audit of France. Hotel De la Marine is one of two stone buildings, located on the Place de la Concorde. It was built in 1757-1774 by the order of Louis XV according to Ange-Jacques Gabriel's design. The construction works were led by architect Jacques-Germain Soufflot. The building was used as a storehouse for the royal furniture and other property.