Boris Hamzeian
The Centre Beaubourg of Paris, now known as the Centre National d'Art et de Culture Georges Pompidou, conceived by Piano+Rogers Architects and Ove Arup & Partners, between 1971 and 1977, represents one of the rare synthesis of the architectural, constructional, artistic, political and cultural effervescence of the 1960s. The Centre Pompidou is Georges Pompidou's presidential monument designed to put France back at the centre of the architectural debate and to offer Parisians a venue dedicated to contemporary art and culture. It is the project by Renzo Piano, Richard Rogers, Gianfranco Franchini and Piano+Rogers Architects, conceived as a flexible, anti-monumental infrastructure to rehabilitate the neighbourhood and act as a broadcast of information, but destined to give up that flexibility and broadcasting role following the discovery of the aesthetic and expressive value of technical equipments. It is the manifesto for a new kind of metal structure conceived by Ted Happold, Peter Rice and Lennart Grut of Ove Arup & Partners to revive the special technique of steel casting and lead it to unprecedented expressive results. Finally, the Centre Pompidou is the difficult attempt to hold together the visions of Pompidou, Piano+Rogers Architects and Ove Arup & Partners, between a flexible environment and an expressive structural and technical machine, between a national monument and a popular anti-monumental infrastructure, between technological devices serving the user and spectacular technology.On the eve of its closure for the largest restoration campaign ever carried out, this research aims to investigate the Centre Pompidou to reconstruct its history, resorting for the first time to a scientific investigation based on the use of all the archival sources accessible to researchers.The immense literature on the project is still characterised by a general fragmentary nature; by the hagiographic and journalistic nature of the monographs; by the diffusion of contributions influenced by the posthumous reinterpretations carried out by Piano, Rogers and Rice, and by the absence of historical monographs aimed at retracing the genesis and the overall development of the project.This research reconstructs the history of the Centre in its entirety through the analysis and reconstruction of its fundamental stages, the idea (1968-1971), the project (1971-1973) and the construction (1973-1977), dedicated respectively to the presidential conception and the development of the international ideas competition in 1971; the evolution of the winning project, from the initial idea to the executive drawings; the realisation of the work and the reconstruction of the history of the construction site.The research uses the historical method and is developed through the retrieval of all the available published and unpublished sources and their classification and analysis. The final essay resorts to the chronicle as a tool for the reconstruction of a narrative that aims to render with historical fidelity the complexity of the events, the genesis of the project choices, and the relationship between the creative process, the construction reality and external constraints. The monographic investigation based on in-depth archive research aims to replace the interpretative readings and posthumous reinterpretations carried out over the last forty years and to become a fundamental reference for future restoration and maintenance work at the Centre Pompidou.
EPFL2021
