The Centre Pompidou Building
Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers (Renzo Piano born 1937; Richard Rogers 1933 to 2021) · 1971 to 1977
Not currently on display. Building closed for renovation from September 2025 until about 2030; the exterior can be viewed from the piazza but access and hoardings may vary during the works.
From the piazza the Centre Pompidou looks like a building still under construction, or a refinery that has wandered into the old streets of Paris. A glass tube containing the escalator zigzags up the west facade. On the east side, along Rue du Renard, the services hang in the open air, painted by function: blue for air conditioning, green for water, yellow for electricity, red for lifts and escalators. The white steel frame is braced by enormous cast steel arms called gerberettes, and the whole thing was assembled like a kit of parts. In 1977 nothing like it had ever been built.
The competition was launched by President Georges Pompidou in 1971 and won, to general astonishment, by two young architects, the Italian Renzo Piano and the Englishman Richard Rogers, with the engineers Ove Arup. Their idea was radical: put everything structural and technical on the outside so that each floor inside could be a completely open space, fifty metres deep without a single column, which could be rearranged for art, books or performances. The building was to be a machine for culture, as democratic and transparent as a department store. Look at the piazza, which slopes gently down toward the entrance like an amphitheatre, and was part of the design from the start.
Critics compared it to an oil rig and a spaceship, but the public came in millions, and it changed how museums thought about themselves. After nearly fifty years of hard use the structure needs asbestos removal, fire safety upgrades, new glazing and a general overhaul, so the building closed in September 2025 for works expected to last until around 2030. Even wrapped and silent it is worth walking around; the colour coded pipes on the Rue du Renard side are the clearest lesson in how the whole thing works.
Did You Know? Richard Rogers said a Parisian woman hit him with her umbrella when he admitted he was one of the architects, so unpopular was the design at first.
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