The present day
The Centre Pompidou opened a new era. The presidents’ grands projets gave Paris new museums and monuments, and French architects build all over the world.
Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers’s Centre Pompidou, opened in 1977, turned its services outwards. Under Mitterrand I.M. Pei’s glass pyramid at the Louvre, the Grande Arche at La Défense and the National Library were built. Ricardo Bofill built Les Espaces d’Abraxas, housing in monumental classical form, at Noisy-le-Grand.
Jean Nouvel designed the Institut du monde arabe with windows like camera apertures that respond to the light, and Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal, who received the Pritzker Prize in 2021, have shown how to transform post-war housing instead of demolishing it.