In the 1980s, France's President François Mitterrand inaugurated the Grands Projets, a multibillion dollar program of national-icon building. However, with the exception of I.M. Pei's glass pyramid at the Louvre, and Jean Nouvel's L'Institut du Monde Arabe, the buildings have been architectural duds: an overblown national library, a pompous office building at La Défense, and an unconvincing park of architectural follies at La Villette. Perhaps the grandest failure was the new opera house at the Place de la Bastille, which opened in 1989. The young Canadian architect Carlos Ott, chosen through an international competition, produced a cold and clumsy composition on the cramped site. Le Monde described it as a "rhinoceros in a bathtub." The only happy outcome was that Charles Garnier's wonderful 19^th-century opera house, which the new building was to have replaced, has gained a new lease on life.