On the final steps leading up to the third level of gloomy rust-brown stairs, the light suddenly bursts free, like dark clouds splitting after a summer storm.
A narrow stairwell opens to a wide platform, dappled with sunbeams piercing thousands on thousands of metal stars. Here are the first drops of what’s known as the Rain of Light, falling through the nearly completed canopy that will cover the Louvre Abu Dhabi.
It’s a colossal engineering and design challenge that, after two years, is now all but complete. Here on a platform of scaffolding is the first glimpse of what will draw visitors in their hundreds of thousands from around the world.
Like a jungle canopy, the museum’s dome stretches in every direction. It encloses a space larger than two football pitches and the height of an 11-storey building, but the impression it creates in real life seems even bigger.
The few workers still remaining on this level are busy wiping and polishing the last grains of sand still clinging to the dome’s aluminium-and-steel cladding. Their tools are feather dusters and cans of a citrus-scented cleaning spray. A faint scent of lemons hangs, incongruously, in the air.
The biggest task now is to take down, rather than put up. From the day in December 2013 when the first 41-tonne piece was lowered into place, the pace of construction has rested – literally – on 119 temporary towers.
Original article by James Langton
Continue reading at The National:
The Louvre Abu Dhabi’s first Rain of Light drops shine through
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