The Louvre-Lens is a museum located in the industrial center of Lens, displays artwork from the Musee du Louvre's collections. Though the museum maintains close institutional links with the Louvre, it draws most of its funding from the Nord-Pas-de-Calais region.

The building is composed of a series of low-laying volumes clad in glass and stainless steel in the middle of a 60-acre former mining site, largely reclaimed by nature. The estimated cost for this building is 82 million Euros. The new satellite building was commissioned after an international architectural competition in 2005. The Japanese architects SANAA (Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa) of Tokyo, associated with architects Imrey-Culbert (New York) and landscape architect Catherine Mosbach (Paris) were responsible for the final design.