P. 53 — 1 THE FINAL JURY: CHALLENGING BALANCES AND A TROJAN HORSE

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INTRODUCTION BY ROBERTO GARGIANI

Emeritus Professor, École Politechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, EPFL

Right from the outset the construction of the Centre national d’art et de culture Georges Pompidou in the center of Paris was an event of signal importance for international architecture in the late sixties and the seventies. The creators of that exceptional masterpiece of the architecture of all time succeeded in embodying, in the work’s technical systems, spaces, and public functioning, the radical impulses that lay behind the unrest rocking European society, with protests in the streets of Paris at the very moment the competition for the design of that new and experimental center for art and culture was launched. The Centre Pompidou was conceived by an international team of architects, engineers, and technicians, united in a cultural axis that ran from Britain to Italy under the banner of radical and neo-avant-garde movements and experimentalist impulses to discover the creative potential of technology. As designed by Ove Arup & Partners and by Richard Rogers, Renzo Piano, and Gianfranco Franchini, it assumed from the earliest phases of design the semblance of a piece of revolutionary social machinery to be installed in the heart of Paris. The design submitted to the competition concealed, under its festive Pop guise, its true nature as a political device rather than a place for the appreciation of contemporary art, which is what had been requested in its terms. The intent was for it to be used to broadcast information that would foster the genesis of an alternative collective and social consciousness, in the name of a planetwide pacifsm. The architecture was identifed with the structure and the plant to such an extent that what was fnally presented, with no veils or rhetoric, was the essence of architecture’s raison d’être. It is no coincidence that the Centre Pompidou emerged at the very moment in history at which this discipline was being called on to look again at its social and theoretical foundations. The result was a pure technological haven at the cutting edge of a primordial vital space. No work of architecture has ever dared cross that line again. It is a paradox of history that the device concocted by a group of British and Italian conspirators should have been accepted by the competition jury and judged by French president Georges Pompidou worthy of being built. The awkward beauty of the Centre Pompidou stems precisely from the political contradiction of a revolutionary project devised to counter the authority of a president who, in a surprise move, decided to make this project his own in order to celebrate himself. What went on in the discussions during the judging of the competition is therefore crucial to understanding the changes refected in the signifcance of the British-Italian design. Greeted in accordance with the French tradition of grandiose works intended to mark, in Paris, an era and a regime, the Centre Pompidou would not escape the destiny that had characterized the other signifcant monument of the capital that shares with it the role of symbolic center of the various forms assumed by French power