Colonnes de Buren/Les Deux Plateaux

monument

The striped columns of varying heights fill the main courtyard of the Palais Royal. Daniel Buren installed these two hundred sixty black and white marble cylinders in nineteen eighty-six to cover a ventilation system for an underground parking garage. The project sparked intense public outrage, with protesters calling it a defacement of the historic seventeenth-century architecture. Today, visitors sit on the shorter pillars while children climb them, making the grid a functioning part of the courtyard life.

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