Centre Pompidou
The link
What it is
Centre
Pompidou, formally named “Centre Georges Pompidou”, after a French president,
is a building complex in Paris. It houses, among others, a public library, a center
for acoustics research, and the Musée National d'Art Moderne, a large modern art museum.
None of
these are as famous as the building itself (although the modern arts museum
comes close). Designed in the seventies by architects Renzo Piano, Richard
Rogers and Gianfranco Franchini, it completely does away with any kind of
surface covering and wears all its infrastructure on the outside.
Much like
the Eiffel tower (with which it shares its ‘naked steel beams’ aesthetic), the
building was reviled at first only to be embraced later on.
What it means to me
The first
time I visited the Centre Pompidou, I was around eight years old. I decided I
liked the building because it had lots of colored tubes and a big transparent
escalator, and then went back to watching the portrait artists on the adjoining
square.
I really
want to write something cute, like “twenty-five years later I still love the
building for its tubes and escalator”, but I would be lying. That said, the
color coding of the tubes for different functions is really neat (yellow for
electricity, green for water, blue for climate control and red for everything
safety-related), and the escalator is a prominent part of the Aaron Draplin-like building logo.
What I love
about Centre Pompidou these days is the way it shows that reality is messy. A
big building complex needs a lot of wiring, control logic and disposal systems,
which are usually hidden away as much as possible. Centre Pompidou peels away
its skin instead, to force you to recognize how complicated it actually is.
In a way, I
am a permanently recovering engineer. I used to have worldview that things
around us were perfectly implemented by Adults Who Knew What They Were Doing.
The truth is that the vast majority of the world is held together with duct
tape, Microsoft Excel and last minute phone calls to the right people. Centre
Pompidou is a testament that modern things, be they buildings or iPads, are a
complicated mess inside. Their design cost a lot of people a lot of time to
figure out, and this is by necessity an exercise in compromises.
Nowhere
does this become more obvious than with the previous owners of my house, who
seem to think that shoddy, temporarily fixtures are a solution for everything.
I have since come to accept that some installation jobs can’t be done cleanly,
and that even plumbers make up the piping as they go along.
Final
thought for the day: how many wires are hidden behind the screen you’re reading
this blog post on?
Leonard
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