Centre National d’Art et de Culture Georges Pompidou

Paul von Naredi-Rainer

Description

To erect “an architectural and urban complex that will mark our century” – as the task was formulated in the invitation to the competition for the first of the “grands projets Parisiens,” whose initiation has since then come to belong to the image of the historically-conscious French presidents – was a challenge that 681 architects’ offices in 49 countries rose to meet. Posthumously named after its initiator, the project was to house in addition to the exhibition rooms for contemporary works of art, a library, a design centre, and music studios as well. It does credit to the project’s initiator that he accepted the competition judges’ courageous decision in favour of the design that, as the embodiment of the anti-museum spirit rooted in the utopias of the late sixties, was virtually the antithesis to the existing cultural monuments. Piano and Rogers, who wanted the desired cultural centre to be understood as a “theme park with information and entertainment,” determined that half of the available building site was to be a public square. Facing it was to be the façade – equipped with neon lights and enormous video screens – of a “cheerful city machine,” which as a “flexible container and dynamic communication machine made of prefabricated parts” represented a technically and functionally provocative architecture. Their basic idea was to erect the building as a huge scaffolding that allowed all manner of changes inside. The interior space was to be totally flexible and even variable in the third dimension by means of pneumatic ceilings. Financial considerations led to the moveable ceilings being abandoned, while fire safety regulations dictated the storeys be subdivided by partition walls, and ideologically motivated concerns led to the rejection of the media façade. In the end, for security reasons, the numerous entrances that had originally been planned were also reduced to a minimum. In spite of the restrictions imposed and the numerous alterations required in the course of many changes of plan, the conceptual focuses of movement, variability, and flexibility were realized here in an exemplary fashion.

The building, 166.4 metres long, in front of the transparent glass skin is dominated by a huge supporting structure of cast steel, its elements developed, shaped, and manufactured specially for this project. Suspended from hollow steel supports eighty centimetres in diameter, 8.9-metre long “gerberettes” (cantilevers named after their inventor, Heinrich Gerber, a nineteenth-century German engineer) carry fourteen oversized trussed beams per storey. Spaced at intervals of 12.8 metres, these each span 48 metres without supports and thereby enable flexible interior spaces. Six metres in front of the main supports are positioned strengthening cross struts that are linked to the gerberettes by means of tension rods. This way, two parallel vertical zones, both 7 metres deep, are created on the two long sides of the building. These provide access and supply functions. Caterpillar chain-like tube escalators climb diagonally across the building’s western façade facing the open space; as the primary access route for all the floors, they not only mark the appearance of the building decisively, but also illustrate directly the myth of movement and mobility that has become a leitmotif of the modern age. On the back of the building too, all the supply lines are shifted to the exterior, thus determining its appearance. The fact that they are painted in bright colours – ventilation shafts in blue, water pipes in green, electrical installations in yellow – is to be understood neither as decoration nor as provocation, but is instead to render elementary architectural functions visible in pithy symbolism.

The building’s spatial system is simple; in addition to an extensive entrance area in which the usual service facilities are accommodated, it includes five more or less open levels in which are housed the library, the museum for modern art, and temporary exhibition spaces. (The IRCAM music institute and its sophisticated sound studios were transferred in their entirety to a subterranean level and then subsequently extended below the square next to the main building.) The floors of the museum at first were only subdivided by suspended walls, a solution which was problematic especially for the presentation of more traditionally-sized pictures. They were then subdivided for the first time into smaller museum rooms organised as a rhythmic sequence by Gae Aulenti in 1985. During the general refurbishment of the building, undertaken under the direction of Renzo Piano between 1997 and 2000 (made necessary not least by the extraordinary success of the Centre Pompidou, which was expected to attract 5,000 visitors daily, and in fact is inundated by five times that quantity per day) Jean-François Bodin organized the storeys into a large boulevard running the entire length of the building and giving access to the small-scale exhibition areas on both sides. The basic principle of the supporting structure – which has remained visible – conveys an impression of the original architectural conception, but not without diverting attention away from the objects on exhibition as it always has done.

The Centre Pompidou, which as the first actually erected building in a long tradition of construction ideas that had never before been consistently implemented (among others, the Russian Constructivists, Buckminster Fuller, Yona Friedman, Serge Chermayeff and the British group Archigram) has become the showpiece of a new building type in which the boundaries between technology and architectural form are dissolved, and has at the same time become the epitome of a provocative, boundary-blurring conception of culture that represents a counterweight to the design of the museum as temple.

Bibliography

Domus 503/1971, pp. 1-7; 511/1972, pp. 9-13; 558/1976, pp. 48-55; 566/1977, pp. 1-37 (Cesare Casati); 570/1977, pp. 17-24 and 575/1977, pp. 1-11 • Architectural Design 42/1972, pp. 407-410 (Peter Rawstorne) • Deutsche Bauzeitung 9/ 1972, pp. 974-976 and 4/1977, pp. 25-31 (Gerhard Ullmann) • Techniques et Architecture 298/1974, pp. 62-69; 317/1977, pp. 62-66 and 326/1979, pp. 33-38 • Alan Colquhoun/Andrew Rabeneck and others, Centre Pompidou (Architectural Design Profiles no. 2), London, 1977 • The Architectural Review 963/1977, pp. 270-294 (Reyner Banham) • L’architecture d’aujourd’hui 189/1977, pp. 40-81 (Hèlène Demoraine/J. Prouvé/François Barré) • Baumeister 4/1977, pp. 329 (Adam W. Löffler) and 8/1984, pp. 78-79 • Bauwelt 11/1977, pp. 316-334 (Jochen Bub/Wim Messing); 7/1978, pp. 254-260 (Jochen Bub) and 4/2000, pp. 26-31 (François Chaslin; Helga Fassbinder) • Werk. archithese 9/1977, pp. 13-28 (Maurice Besset, Franz Meyer, Leonardo Bezzola, Cathérine Mitsion/Magda Zakarian, Corinne Jacopin) • Yukio Futagawa, Piano + Rogers Centre Beaubourg, GA no. 44, 1977 • Museumskunde 43/ 1978, pp. 2-10 (Manfred Eisenbeis) • Jean Baudrillard, “Der Beaubourg-Effekt,” in: Jean Baudrillard, Kool Killer or: Der Aufstand der Zeichen, Berlin, 1978, pp. 59-82 • Alexander Fils, Das Centre Pompidou in Paris, Munich, 1980 • Centre national d’art et de culture Georges Pompidou, (Stahl und Form 1980) • Casabella 515/1985, pp. 54-59 (Pierre-Alain Croset/Silvia Milesi) • Lluisa López Moreno/José Ramon López Rodríguez/Fernando Mendoza Castells (eds.), El Architecto y el Museo, Jerez, 1990, pp. 18-25 • Alexander Tzonis/Liane Lefaivre, Architecture in Europe since 1968, London, 1992, pp. 84-89 • Peter Buchanan, Renzo Piano Building Workshop. Complete Works, vol. 1, London, 1994, pp. 52-63; vol. 3, London, 1997, pp. 1 ff. • Kenneth Powell, Richard Rogers, Zurich/Munich/London, 1994, pp. 44-51 • Deyan Sudjic, Richard Rogers. Buildings and Projects, London, 1994, pp. 52-65 • Nathan Silver, The Making of Beaubourg. A Building Biography of the Centre Pompidou Paris, Cambridge, Mass., 1994 • Josep M. Montaner/Jordi Oliveras, Museums for a New Century, Barcelona, 1995, pp. 32-35 • GA Architect 14/1997, “Renzo Piano Building Workshop,” pp. 30-45 • Victoria Newhouse, Towards a New Museum, New York, 1998, pp. 193-198 • Winfried Nerdinger (ed.), Konstruktion und Raum in der Architektur des 20. Jahrhunderts, Munich/Berlin/London/ New York, 2002, pp. 78-81