The idea of losing a lung is far from comforting. Even if you are told it is the only way to save the rest of your body, you would likely be inclined, if such an operation were ever recommended, to resist or try to negotiate. The reactions to the announcements made by Laurent Le Bon, the president of the Centre Pompidou, throughout 2023 – that the building by Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers would close for major renovations for five years – could be interpreted in the same way. The strike involving staff, the opinion pieces and petitions signed by figures from the cultural world, the grievances voiced by local residents, neighborhood shopkeepers, art lovers and other regular visitors were all attempts to ensure that this extraordinary engine of urban energy could continue operating − at least partially − during the renovation.
The prospect of its closure has been all the harder to accept given that this icon of 20th-century architecture is not even 50 years old. Parisians still remember the renovation work in the late 1990s that already deprived them of access for two years, and the expected duration of the new project now seems somewhat excessive.
The entire problem with architecture from the second half of the 20th century (and the decades that have followed) lies in these assumptions. In reality, according to Boris Hamzeian, architectural historian and author of Centre Pompidou. Le défi du Total Design (“Centre Pompidou and the Challenge of Total Design,” 2024), “for a building from that era, 50 years is already quite old.”; the materials of the modern era are less durable than those of the past. But the structure of the Centre Pompidou was designed to accommodate this, and even more, to ensure – as President Pompidou requested of the young competition winners in 1971 – that the building would “last 500 years.” This lightweight, entirely metal structure, to which all of the building’s technical systems are attached, embodies the principle of flexibility at the core of the project and guarantees its durability: namely, the possibility of replacing elements and reorganizing them as needed. In fact, since its opening in 1977, the space has been in constant transformation.
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