The Centre Pompidou opens
A cultural centre with its structure, pipes and escalators on the outside opens in the heart of Paris. Many think it looks like a refinery.
High-tech architecture made technology a means of expression and the cultural centre an open square.
After the student revolt of May 1968, the French president Georges Pompidou wanted to give Paris a new kind of cultural institution that was open to all and brought together art, books, music and design under one roof. The site chosen was the Plateau Beaubourg, an area that had been cleared and long used as a car park, near the old market halls of Les Halles. In 1971 an international competition was announced, and the jury, which included Jean Prouvé and Philip Johnson, chose from among hundreds of entries. The winners were two young and almost unknown architects, the Italian Renzo Piano and the Briton Richard Rogers. The engineering firm Ove Arup & Partners, with the structural engineer Peter Rice, became a crucial partner.
The architects wanted to create a flexible machine for culture, in which every floor could be used freely, without walls or columns. The structure, ventilation, pipes and circulation were therefore placed on the outside. A steel frame with large cast brackets supports the building, and the services are colour-coded: blue for air, green for water, yellow for electricity and red for movement, such as lifts. An escalator in a glass tube snakes up the façade facing the city. In front of the building a large square slopes down, where street performers and visitors soon took their place. The building houses France’s national museum of modern art, a large public library and an institute for research into music and acoustics.
Pompidou died before the building was finished, and it was inaugurated in 1977 by his successor. The criticism was harsh, and the building was called a refinery and a tangle of pipes, but visitors came in far greater numbers than anyone had expected. The wear and tear was so great that the building was renovated around the turn of the millennium, and in 2025 it closed for a new renovation lasting several years. The building was the breakthrough of high-tech architecture, and Rogers and others went on to make buildings in which technology was the expression. The link to Sweden is strong. Pontus Hultén, who had built up the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, became the first director of the centre’s art museum, and Kulturhuset on Sergels torg, completed in 1974, was based on a closely related idea of an open house.