09 - Centre Pompidou

09 - Centre Pompidou - Renzo Piano, Richard Rogers - 1977

Place Georges-Pompidou, Paris

Renzo Piano (Genoa, 1937) is an Italian architect best known for his high-tech public spaces. He established a partnership with Richard Rogers (Florence, 1933-2021), british architect, from 1970 to 1977, during which they entered and won the competition for Pompidou. They were unknown at the time, and decided to collaborate due to friendship and similar architectural views. They surprised everybody when they were chosen against 680 other teams of well-established architecture offices. Their idea came out of a time when the youth of Paris were protesting on the streets and the design was about making a place where people could come together. Since, they both went on to start their own practices, becoming world-renowned architects.

Nestled in the centre of Paris since 1977, the Centre Pompidou building, a glass and metal structure bathed in light, resembles a heart fed by monumental arteries in bright primary colours. The building’s exposed superstructure is constructed from more than 16,000 tonnes of prefabricated steel parts and the facades are covered with colour-coded building services: blue marking its airconditioning, yellow is for electrics, green denotes water pipes, and red highlights tubular escalators and elevators. Envisioned as a genuinely living organism, the 6 inside levels provide fully modular plateaux of 7,000m2 each, equivalent to two football fields. They were designed to be organised according to needs and thus meet the requirements of a variety of activities. The building embodies a radical vision in which spaces are no longer defined by their role.

It has once been said that Pompidou “revolutionised museums, transforming what had once been elite monuments into popular places of social and cultural exchange, woven into the heart of the city.” Their entry exemplified constructivism and was a high-tech modern cultural center structured with a system gerberettes and trusses unlike anything seen in the architectural world before. Their concept, depicted in one of their competition drawings as a collage, was portraying the museum itself as movement. 46