Pompidou Centre
From Paris Hotels Reviews
Celebrating its thirtieth anniversary in 2007 and attracting over five million visitors a year, the Pompidou Centre (www.centrepompidou.fr; M° Rambuteau/Hôtel-de-Ville), known locally as Beaubourg, would seem to have fulfilled its founder Georges Pompidou’s vision of a world-class modern art museum and multidisciplinary arts centre. Such is its popularity and success that in 2000 the building had to close for two years for major repair work from all the wear and tear. When the centre first opened, however, it met with a very mixed reception, with one critic dubbing it an oil refinery. The design is certainly radical. The architects, Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers, wanted to move away from the ideas of galleries as closed treasure chests to create something more open and accessible, so they stripped the “skin” off the building and made all the “bones” visible. The infrastructure was put on the outside: escalator tubes and utility pipes, colour-coded according to their function, climb around the exterior, giving the building its crazy snakes-and-ladders appearance.
The centre’s main draw is its modern art museum, the Musee National d’Art Moderne, on the fourth and fifth floors, with temporary exhibitions on the sixth floor. One of the added treats of visiting these is that you get to ascend the transparent escalator on the outside of the building, affording superb views over the city. Equally good is the vista from the sleek sixth-floor restaurant Georges. On the lower floors there are cinemas, a performance space and the BPI or Bibliotheque Publique (Mon-Fri noon-10pm, Sat & Sun 11am-10pm; free), which has an impressive collection of 2500 periodicals, including international press, 10,000 CD’s and 2200 documentary films.
Amid the centre’s thirtieth anniversary celebrations plans were announced to open an annexe of the modern art museum in Shanghai. The centre is making much of the benefits of cultural exchange, but the other major bonus is that the project will bring in much-needed revenue and help to finance the costly bill of maintaining the Pompidou Centre; those colourful exterior pipes are all very well but they require constant repainting, and the building itself consumes huge amounts of energy.
