Arts
Pleasure dome in Paris
Alastair Best
The late President Pompidou was un honune de culture—contemporary culture especially. He was addicted to poetry; he collected Modern paintings; he plunged fearlessly into the tangled undergrowth of modern Mr, Lisle; he even had a suite of rooms at the elysee Palace done up in chrome and leather and tinted glass. He was appalled both at the narrowly conservative tastes of his fellowcountrymen, and at the withering reputation of Paris as an intellectual and artistic centre. It was his passionate wish, he °lice said, to establish a major cultural centre in the heart of the French capital, where the fine arts, music, cinema, literature would all be brought together under one roof. The Centre National d'Art et de Culture Georges-Pompidou, which threw open its doors to the public on 2 February, is a rnournent to these ambitions. It is a blockbuster of a building. Planned and built at What seems like amazing speed—by fumbling British standards—it is a cultural dePartMent store (in a city which perfected i he department store) that expects to receive e 10,000 customers a day. For their 50F annual abonnetnent, visitors will have the run of four major departments spread over t WentY-five acres: a museum of modern art, a Public reference library, a design centre nd a workshop of experimental music. Like '0" good stores, the Pompidou centre stands vn., a good pitch—just north of the Hotel de 0.111e, and east of the massive Metro intertu_ange taking shape on the disembowelled `cs Halles site. c The building was conceived during the fident days of a Gaullist boom, and eoks it. But it has been completed in a r:cession, under the uncertain leadership of son IndePendent Republican and is therefore GTething of an embarrassment. Most ear`anchMen it seems—from President Gist, downwards—view the Pompidou ceni'e with emotions ranging from polite disfi4ste to incredulous horror. They deplore, res"t of all its Napoleonic concentration of t)urces when every policy now favours sPersal; secondly, they deplore its building (cs,.s,ls (some £110 million) and running costs ecsr° 6 million a year, with a windowth74°Ing bill alone of over £4 million); teIrdi Y, and mostly, they deplore its archictITure. Pompidoleum, sugar-beet refinery, tillral King-Kong—these are some of the .,sIY epithets which have been coined to tie sCeribe its mighty structure of exposed ;el' multi-coloured ductwork and trans‘L_rent circulation tubes. roalL.he architecture is indeed something to best'e °ne gasp and stretch one's eyes. The eo waY to experience it, perhaps, is, to rneacrosS it suddenly, by taking the Metro to Rambuteau and surfacing on the rue du Renard. What you see exploding off the pavement and rising to a height of six storeys is Pompidou's 'services facade'—an orgy of colour-coded ductwork (blue for air, green for water, yellow for electricity) topped off by four immense cooling towers and an arsenal of air-intakes. But the other facade is quite as startling. Walk east from the boulevard de Sebastopol and across the newly formed Plateau de la Reynie and you see it shimmering above the recently restored roof-line of the rue St Martin—a gigantic steel skeleton, bisected on the diagonal by a massive, transparent circulation tube, containing a pair of moving staircases. Even when seen from a distance, from the terrace of the Sacre Coeur, for example, Pompidou is an imposing spectacle as it erupts above the roof-line of central Paris, with its cooling towers smoking and the stainless steel casings on its exposed trusses glittering in the sunlight.
Whatever it may not be, the Pompidou Centre is superlative townscape. Its contrasts of scale, materials and colour are jarring, but also exhilarating. The finicky and obsessive clarity with which every nut and bolt of the structure has been expressed breaks down the scale and enables it to fit in astonishingly well with its elderly neighbours. The real architectural and urban crimes of central Paris lie elsewhere : the outrageous Maine-Montparnasse tower, the equally deplorable tower of the Arts Faculty, just upstream from Notre-Dame, the monstrous regiment of high-rise housing in the outer arrondissements, the Right Bank expressway. These and other blunders stem directly from President Pompidou's unfortunate habit of intervening in the planning process—and his successor has not been slow in undoing as many of them as he can. Pompidou-inspired schemes, such as the immense commercial centre planned for the Les Halles site, have been nipped briskly in the bud.
The one building, ironically enough, to have eluded Giscard's restraining hand was the Pompidou centre itself. The incoming President called the scheme in, and asked the architects to trim off a storey, and muffle up the exposed services on the roof and the east elevation. Alas, it emerged that they had already spent 80 per cent of their not inconsiderable budget—and so none of these tepid modifications could go through. So the built reality is, in its essentials, the competition-winning scheme of Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers. Like many great buildings it is based on a very simple idea: in this case to provide the maximum volume of uninterrupted floor space for a varied and unpredictable assortment of cultural activities.
To do this, the architects devised a structural system which turns the building inside out, banishing to the exterior the bits which normally occupy fixed space on the inside— structural columns, lifts, staircases and vertical pipe runs. This frees the interior, creating the equivalent of six warehouses piled one on top of the other, each with a floor area of two football pitches. The structural frame which makes this possible is a giant Meccano kit of steel parts: trusses, columns, gerberettes, struts, tension rods. A good deal of this steel skeleton was specially made in West Germany. The huge cast steel gerberettes, which transfer the weight of the trusses on to the water-filled columns, as well as the trusses themselves were both fabricated at Krupps. The trusses were so long that they had to be brought on site at midnight, accompanied by special convoy, circumventing the Place de la Republique with inches to spare. These and other tailor-made components betray the structure's true identity; for this is not, in any true sense, a flexible kit of parts easily altered, easily replaced. All floor levels are fixed, and there is even a dividing safety wall running across the uninterrupted floor space, in the goalmouth, as it were, of one of the football pitches.
Nor is this a megastructure, despite what Reyner Banham and his clip-on clique may say. In his new book Megastructure (Thames and Hudson) Banham claims that the Pompidou centre must be a megastructure simply because it looks so like one. But the term implies, to me at least, something far more all-embracing. The striking thing about the Pompidou centre is the number of activities and departments which could not be plugged into the frame. These include not only the pods, inflatables and other temporary structures which are expected to sprout on the sloping piazza, but also Brancusi's studio (being constructed alongside) and Pierre Boulez's musical workshop, which is being buried in an acoustically controlled mega-crypt away from the main building. Megastructure or no, the French will soon, I suspect, come to love their new monument. They felt bitterly aggrieved about the Eiffel Tower once, and they soon got over that.
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