The Centre Pompidou in Paris was intended to be a building embodying change and transformation. A response to the street protests and the radicalism of 1968, it represented an idea of a less elitist, more accessible culture: open, public, responsive and novel. It embraced high and low arts; the avant garde and pop; performance, a public library and a panoply of new media. It has now become, however, like the Louvre, a heavily protected national monument, a heritage building.
The Pompidou was also never designed to last hundreds of years — it is a building of its era, heavily serviced and difficult to maintain. Its architect, Renzo Piano (who designed and built it with Richard Rogers between 1971 and 1977) originally proposed that it should be completely overhauled every 25 years.
Now nearly 50 years old, it is now about to undergo a huge transformation, its first since the 1990s and its biggest ever. An engineering project to restore the building, repair the structure, remove asbestos and update its services is scheduled to start in 2025. There is controversy over the original budget of €262mn (now looking more like €358mn), with funding as yet incomplete, and artists and cultural figures have expressed outrage at plans to close the Pompidou for five years during the renovations. However, the works will give the opportunity for a rethink of the uses of the building’s vast spaces, many subterranean and hitherto inaccessible.