Mudam

The glass and pale stone rising out of the old fort at the tip of the plateau is the Mudam — the Grand Duke Jean Museum of Modern Art — and it was designed by I. M. Pei, the architect of the pyramid at the Louvre. He was given the job in 1989. The museum opened in 2006. The seventeen years in between are a very Luxembourgish story.

The trouble was the site. Prime Minister Jacques Santer wanted a museum of modern art and wanted it here, in the Dräi Eechelen park, on the remains of Fort Thüngen; a good part of the country wanted the fort left to tell its own story, as a museum of the fortress. The argument ran for years, until in 1997 a compromise was struck: the art museum would be built on and around the fort, would give up two thousand square metres of its plan, and the fort's three towers would get a fortress museum of their own, the Musée Dräi Eechelen, which sits beside it. Then came the delays, the budget of 88 million euros, a court case over whether the golden stone Pei had specified for the façade — "magny doré, Louvre type" — was really magny doré, and some muttering that the museum was being run by a Frenchwoman. Pei's building follows the lines of the old fortifications: its walls are the fort's walls, and the big glass roof over the hall is set on the geometry of Vauban's arrowhead.

When it finally opened, on the 1st of July 2006, Grand Duke Jean, to whom it is dedicated, cut the ribbon, and 115,000 people came in the first year — a record for a museum in this country. There had never been a public collection of modern art in Luxembourg, and the budget could not buy one, so the museum collects the present instead: work by around a hundred living or recent artists, and exhibitions that change with the seasons. The café under the glass, with the park and the old town beyond, is one of the best places in the city to sit down.