Les Deux Plateaux

You are standing in the Cour d Honneur of the Palais Royal, a space that was once nothing more than a parking lot for government officials. Today, it is defined by Les Deux Plateaux, an art installation featuring two hundred and sixty black and white striped columns of varying heights. These pillars, created by artist Daniel Buren in the mid-nineteen eighties, intentionally disrupt the rigid, symmetric architecture of the seventeenth-century palace. What you see is a deliberate collision between the classic, aristocratic past of Paris and the bold, modern aesthetics of the late twentieth century.