*Another special report by francophile ex- architect, cartoonist , man of letters and opera buff , Peter Burleigh, almost certain to be hung in a prominent place in The Louvre or from the Eiffel Tower after this provocative assessment .
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Remember when the ape reached out to touch the mysterious slab in Kubrick’s 2001? For a similar experience – with you as the ape – try strolling through the gorgeous streets of Paris’ 4th Arrondissment to suddenly be confronted with The Centre Georges Pompidou.
This building, which my guide book breathlessly assures me contains more than twice the amount of steel than the Eiffel Tower, is an unhuman block of pseudo-industrial pseudo-architectural pseudo-fantasy which goes a long way to reverse centuries of design progress.
The idea of pulling the services and structure from the inside of a building – the ducts, escalators, lifts, columns, bracing and stuff - and exposing them on the outside has real merit. But it’s not enough. Even an ape would have known that a big follow-up would be required to make the pipes and beams aesthetically pleasing. This didn’t happen.
In the hands of designers Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers the resolution of their idea is as artistically sensitive as ripping the guts out of a chicken and plastering them on your kitchen window.
Because you can only fool some of the apes some of the time, it’s not a happy place. Despite its Disneyesque primary colours, intended to communicate the mechanical logic of the arteries of power, water and people-moving elements, the building simply looks more like the inside of a large-scale fuse box than ever.Outside, knots of disconsolate students, street people, drunks and beggars sit facing the building on an unmerciful cobbled hardstand. They stare blankly, waiting vainly for a sign of welcome. Any trees have been pushed away to the perimeter where huge air intake pipes you might have seen on the Titanic form a visual barrier.
While the building does its best to be repellent it’s what’s inside that’s worth the effort. The modern art collections are truly extraordinary, like a waterfall of Champagne that never runs dry. What does run dry are the superlatives required to describe the 1000+ works on permanent display. List all the names of the great artists from 1900 to the present day and you’ll have your description.
The experience of the building itself has moments of pleasure. Ride the external escalators which clank to the rooftop restaurant and you’ll rise above the rooftops with their multitudes of shapes and sizes and their mushrooming groups of chimneypots and eccentric loft dwellings. Ahhh. You’re still in Paris. Spires near and far poke through trees foggy with green shoots. In a few days the leaves will be out. Art and pragmatic design combine with nature in a...but wait - look back at the building you’re standing on and understand that the Pompidou Centre is not part of nature like the rest of Paris seems to be.
Georges Pompidou was the President of France from 1969 to 1974, and insisted on the modernisation of Paris. Unfortunately he believed in destroying things to save them. He was responsible for choosing the design of the Pompidou Centre. He tore down the wonderful Les Halles open-air markets ("the belly of Paris") and replaced them with a ghastly shopping mall, and he constructed an expressway along the right bank of the Seine.
On the ground floor schoolkids are having fun making small amateur films. The Centre has put up mock offices, restaurants, apartments and forests to use as backgrounds. The name for this program is "The Film Factory", and it’s spot on. Film, with its suspension of reality, is the perfect media for this building. Unlike film, however, the building can’t transcend its dour engineer’s demeanour, which was recognised in the James Bond movie Moonraker in which a fifth floor room is shown as part of the villain’s space station.
At night the Centre glitters with light but it isn’t gold. Get closer and feel its cold industrial rationale sneering at your humanity. At the end of our visit we pass through the excitement of being in the presence of great art to being ingested by the building’s "inhumanity zone" and spat out into the rain.
But don’t let the building win. It’s taken me 35 years to overcome my nausea and go inside. I disliked it so much that every time I visited Paris I’d turn on my heel and walk away from it, and that meant I have consistently missed one of the great art experiences on the planet. Now I’ve been seduced by the art inside, The Pompidou Centre will always look to me as if a dirty paper bag has been pulled over the head of a beautiful woman.
This building, which my guide book breathlessly assures me contains more than twice the amount of steel than the Eiffel Tower, is an unhuman block of pseudo-industrial pseudo-architectural pseudo-fantasy which goes a long way to reverse centuries of design progress.
The idea of pulling the services and structure from the inside of a building – the ducts, escalators, lifts, columns, bracing and stuff - and exposing them on the outside has real merit. But it’s not enough. Even an ape would have known that a big follow-up would be required to make the pipes and beams aesthetically pleasing. This didn’t happen.
In the hands of designers Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers the resolution of their idea is as artistically sensitive as ripping the guts out of a chicken and plastering them on your kitchen window.
Because you can only fool some of the apes some of the time, it’s not a happy place. Despite its Disneyesque primary colours, intended to communicate the mechanical logic of the arteries of power, water and people-moving elements, the building simply looks more like the inside of a large-scale fuse box than ever.Outside, knots of disconsolate students, street people, drunks and beggars sit facing the building on an unmerciful cobbled hardstand. They stare blankly, waiting vainly for a sign of welcome. Any trees have been pushed away to the perimeter where huge air intake pipes you might have seen on the Titanic form a visual barrier.
While the building does its best to be repellent it’s what’s inside that’s worth the effort. The modern art collections are truly extraordinary, like a waterfall of Champagne that never runs dry. What does run dry are the superlatives required to describe the 1000+ works on permanent display. List all the names of the great artists from 1900 to the present day and you’ll have your description.
The experience of the building itself has moments of pleasure. Ride the external escalators which clank to the rooftop restaurant and you’ll rise above the rooftops with their multitudes of shapes and sizes and their mushrooming groups of chimneypots and eccentric loft dwellings. Ahhh. You’re still in Paris. Spires near and far poke through trees foggy with green shoots. In a few days the leaves will be out. Art and pragmatic design combine with nature in a...but wait - look back at the building you’re standing on and understand that the Pompidou Centre is not part of nature like the rest of Paris seems to be.
Georges Pompidou was the President of France from 1969 to 1974, and insisted on the modernisation of Paris. Unfortunately he believed in destroying things to save them. He was responsible for choosing the design of the Pompidou Centre. He tore down the wonderful Les Halles open-air markets ("the belly of Paris") and replaced them with a ghastly shopping mall, and he constructed an expressway along the right bank of the Seine.
On the ground floor schoolkids are having fun making small amateur films. The Centre has put up mock offices, restaurants, apartments and forests to use as backgrounds. The name for this program is "The Film Factory", and it’s spot on. Film, with its suspension of reality, is the perfect media for this building. Unlike film, however, the building can’t transcend its dour engineer’s demeanour, which was recognised in the James Bond movie Moonraker in which a fifth floor room is shown as part of the villain’s space station.
At night the Centre glitters with light but it isn’t gold. Get closer and feel its cold industrial rationale sneering at your humanity. At the end of our visit we pass through the excitement of being in the presence of great art to being ingested by the building’s "inhumanity zone" and spat out into the rain.
But don’t let the building win. It’s taken me 35 years to overcome my nausea and go inside. I disliked it so much that every time I visited Paris I’d turn on my heel and walk away from it, and that meant I have consistently missed one of the great art experiences on the planet. Now I’ve been seduced by the art inside, The Pompidou Centre will always look to me as if a dirty paper bag has been pulled over the head of a beautiful woman.
