| Project Name: Centre Pompidou | |
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| Description: Designed in partnership with Renzo Piano, the Pompidou Centre was the building which brought Richard Rogers international fame. The scheme (won in competition) brought together the themes – skin and structure, technology and flexibility, movement and anti-monumentalism – which have characterised Rogers’ architecture from the mid 1960s. The architects envisaged their building as a cross between ‘an information-oriented computerized Times Square and the British Museum’, a democratic place for all people, all ages and all creeds, simultaneously instant and solemn, and the centrepiece of a regenerated quarter of the city. It was to be ‘a giant climbing frame’, the antithesis of existing cultural monuments. The completed Centre fully realises their intentions, miraculously fusing the spirit of 1968 with the ostensible aim of commemorating a conservative head of state. Since half of the total available site was set aside by Rogers and Piano as a public square, the Centre had to be tall to accommodate the 90,000 square metres (one million square feet) of space demanded by the brief. The decision to place structure and services on the outside was driven primarily by the need for internal flexibility – the scheme provided huge expanses of uninterrupted space on massive, open floors nearly 50 metres deep. The staggering scale of these internal spaces took to extremes Rogers’ concern to create space free from the intrusion of services and stairs (reflecting the influence of Kahn’s doctrine of ‘served and servant spaces’) and these areas have proved to be highly adaptable, their character and use changing freely within the life of the Centre – there is no obvious hierarchy which separates art and learning from more mundane activities. The structural system provided for a braced and exposed steel superstructure with reinforced-concrete floors, realised with the help of the brilliant engineer Peter Rice. External services give scale and detail to the facades, while celebration of movement and access is provided by lifts and escalators which, like the services, were outside the covering of the building. The result is a highly expressive, strongly articulated building which came to be seen as a landmark in the development of ‘high tech’ (a term Rogers loathes). Yet the achievement of Rogers and Piano at Beaubourg was broadly urbanistic as much as architectural. The building and great public square were intended to revitalise an area of Paris that had been in decline. The neighbouring Marais district, now vibrant and multi-cultural, underlines the enormous success of the Pompidou’s role as a catalyst for urban regeneration, changing the character of Paris and laying the foundations for the later Grands Projets. It is as a place for people and a restatement of the fundamental Rogers belief that cities adapt to the needs of people (not vice versa) that the Centre must be counted one of the most significant post-war European buildings. The Pompidou’s radicalism is still striking and has proved attractive to a vast public: more than 7 million people visit the building every year. The recent renovation prior to re-opening in 2000 significantly compromised the original design. Escalators have been installed from the foyer to library, permanent exhibition spaces have been introduced and the public is now charged to use the escalators rising up the façade. That said, the building and its extraordinary contents remain as popular as ever, while crowds fill the square, clustering around musicians, acrobats and fire-eaters. Beaubourg – inside and out – remains as magnetic as ever. | |
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