Beaubourg
Centre Pompidou
| PLATEAU DE BEAUBOURG was an empty space in the
heart of Paris. The late President Pompidou chose this site for his own
pet project, a National Arts Centre. The designers were an Anglo-Italian
firm working from London, Piano & Rogers. They produced a building consisting of six enormous empty spaces on top of each other, a building that can be adapted to any use its owners might want to make of it. If you want more height, take out a floor. If you want more floors, slot them in. internal walls? Put them where you like. So that the space inside could be entirely empty, all the services, corridors, staircases and lifts had to be on the outside of the building, which is a maze of pipes, ducts, escalators and beams, all colour-coded in bright colours. This is a building you have to either love or hate. I love it. Its official name is CENTRE NATIONAL DES ARTS ET DE LA CULTURE GEORGES POMPIDOU, but the people of Paris call it Beaubourg, because the people of Paris always keep the old name whatever you tell them. Inside are the Museum of Modern Art, several free exhibition halls, an information centre, a fabulous library dealing in books, slides, film, video and microfilm; a cinema, a News Library with all this week’s new books, magazines, TV programmes and records; a children’s Art workshop, a Musical Research Institute and much more. The rooftop café offers good views and some of the cheapest coffee in town. Outside, on the Plateau de Beaubourg itself, there are continual performances by buskers, jugglers, sword-swallowers, fire-eaters, anybody who can do something unusual and hold out a hat. |
