The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers with Gianfranco Franchini · a national centre of art and culture in one long steel-framed block, scored with the sloping square on its west side that the design made part of the scheme · column-free floors, each spanned by long lattice girders between two lines of columns, the girders resting on cast-steel brackets, the gerberettes, that pivot on the columns and are held down at their outer ends by slender ties; diagonal cross-bracing on the long faces · the services outside the envelope on the east face, coded blue for air, green for water, yellow for electricity and red for movement, the structure white; on the west face an escalator in a glazed tube climbing the full height in diagonal runs, with a gallery at each floor · built for a free public library of open shelves, the national museum of modern art and a centre of industrial design, with cinemas, a forum at the level of the square and a restaurant at the top · Plateau Beaubourg, 4th arrondissement, Paris · competition 1971, built 1972 to 1977, inaugurated 31 January 1977 · Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers with Gianfranco Franchini, architects; Ove Arup & Partners, engineers, with Peter Rice and Edmund Happold for the structure; for the French state, at the initiative of President Georges Pompidou · as it stands, frame, services, escalator and square as built; the galleries remade in the 1980s and the interior renewed from 1997 to 2000, when the ride to the top became a ticketed one
Mode
A national centre of art and culture as an open, serviced frame; a library, a museum and a centre of design on column-free floors, beside a public square
Mythos
The agora at the foot of the house of culture; the ascent from the crowded square to a summit over the city; the body opened, its organs outside the skin; the machine as the image of culture made public
Phase
Competition 1971, judged by a jury under Jean Prouvé; built 1972 to 1977; inaugurated 31 January 1977; the galleries remade in the 1980s; renewed from 1997 to 2000, the climb to the top ticketed since
Presentation
A long block of column-free floors on lattice girders and cast-steel gerberettes; services coded by colour on the east face; an escalator in a glazed tube on the west face; a sloping square filling the western half of the site
Register
Festive, exhilarating and mechanical; one register, the machine’s, a white frame and coloured ducts against the grey of the old city
Scale
One building and its square; the city and its public, the arts and knowledge, the machine and the state
Governing Proposition
The French state asked for a library, a museum and a centre of design in the old heart of Paris, and two young architects answered with a frame that keeps nothing inside but floor. The wager of the building is that a house of culture can be a public street instead of a temple: structure, air, water, power and movement put outside the walls and shown, half the site given away to a square, and the visitor carried up the face of the building to the whole city.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The Centre national d’art et de culture Georges Pompidou was a commission of the French state, made at the initiative of the president whose name it bears. It was to stand on the Plateau Beaubourg in the 4th arrondissement, in the old centre of Paris, and to hold several institutions in one house: the Bibliothèque publique d’information, a public library of open shelves with free entry; the Musée national d’art moderne; and the Centre de création industrielle, for industrial design. With them came cinemas, a forum at the level of the square and a restaurant at the top, and IRCAM, the institute for music, underground beside it. Georges Pompidou died in 1974, before the building was finished.
The inheritance was the temple and the palace. From the Altes Museum and the British Museum to the modern museum of the century, still raised on a podium behind a façade, the house of art and books had been entered by steps, under a portico, past a threshold of rank. Against that stood the avant-garde of the 1960s on paper: the megastructures of Archigram, and Cedric Price’s Fun Palace for Joan Littlewood, never built, which proposed culture as a serviced frame that could be changed at will. The idea of the building had been drawn before. It had not been built, and not in the centre of a capital at the state’s expense.
The competition of 1971 drew an international field, and its jury, under Jean Prouvé, chose Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers with Gianfranco Franchini, architects with almost nothing built, for the state’s flagship. The engineers were Ove Arup & Partners, with Peter Rice and Edmund Happold the names the record gives for the structure. The scheme answered the brief’s demand for open, changeable space by moving everything that was not floor to the edges and beyond: the structure to the faces, the ducts and the moving stairs outside the walls. It left the western half of the site empty, as a square. Building ran from 1972 to 1977, against a hostile press and a city that compared it to a refinery, and the centre was inaugurated on 31 January 1977 and opened to the public early in February.
Movement II
The building is a rectangular block with its long side running north to south. Its structure is a steel frame of transverse frames repeated down the length, all to one bay. In each frame long lattice girders span the full depth of the floor between two lines of columns, so that each floor is one plateau without a single column in it. Diagonal cross-bracing runs across the long faces. Everything the floors need and do not want inside them is carried outside the two lines of columns, in a zone made for it.
That zone is made by the gerberette. The girders do not rest on the columns directly but on cast-steel brackets, named for Heinrich Gerber’s hinged beam, which pivot on the columns and reach outward. The inner arm takes the girder; the outer arm is held down by a slender tension member. The bracket works as a rocker in balance: the girder is shortened by the reach of the inner arm, and the columns carry nearly pure compression. The outer arm turns the edge of the building into a carrying zone, and in that zone hang the services on one face and the escalator on the other.
Cast steel was an industrial material long abandoned in building. Here it was brought back and given a crafted, almost hand-made joint, and Peter Rice, who gave his own account of the gerberettes and of cast steel in An Engineer Imagines (1994), argued that this was the point: a cast joint returns the hand to an industrial building. The spans and the castings were untried at that scale in a public building. The frame is the building’s first achievement and its plainest statement, and it is legible from every side, girder, bracket and tie repeated down the length as the square looks on.
Movement III
On the east face, to the rue du Renard, the services stand outside the envelope, and they are coded by colour: blue for air, green for water, yellow for electricity, red for movement, the lifts and the escalators. The structure is white. Ducts, pipes and stacks are massed down the whole length of the street front, and at night the face reads like an organ or a refinery set against the old houses opposite. The anatomy of every modern building, which is ordinarily hidden in ceilings and shafts, is here laid open and labelled.
The face states the building’s second claim: that a building is a system of structure, air, water, power and movement, and that the system can be shown. It also states the law that governs the whole. Whatever serves or moves is put outside the clear volume, in the zone the gerberettes carry, and coded by what it carries, so that air, water, power and people become the same kind of thing. The law runs from the east face round to the west, and the whole length obeys one bay and one joint.
The cost was paid in weather and in comfort. The exposed steel and the external services decayed fast, and the building needed a full renovation within some twenty years. A glass box with its ducts outside performed poorly as an enclosure, and inside, the floors run under low ducted ceilings that are ordinary for their extent. The saturation of the colours is rhetoric as much as necessity, and much of the apparatus is shown because it can be. Command of the frame outran command of the building as an enclosure.
Movement IV
The square fills roughly the western half of the site and slopes down toward the building, like a raked square, so that the doors are reached by going down with the crowd rather than up past a portico. The building gives half its ground away, and the public ground becomes its entrance. The square is the agora at the foot of the house of culture, and it has been used as one, as a slope of crowd and performance in front of the frame.
On the west face the escalator climbs the full height of the building in a glazed tube, the chenille, in diagonal runs, with level galleries at each floor, facing the square and the city. As it climbs, the square falls away, the roofs of the Marais and Les Halles open, and at the top Paris lies laid out from Notre-Dame to Sacré-Cœur and the Eiffel Tower. For its first twenty-three years the ride was free, a public ascent given to anyone who took it, and the escalator became one of the city’s streets. Going to see art was also seeing Paris.
Inside, the library’s open floor, free to all, made the building a daily place for students and the unemployed as much as a monument. The museum’s floors are another matter. The column-free plateau, the end the whole section was bent to serve, is low for its extent, and the galleries reach the level of good rooms rather than of elevation; the building’s best moment lies outside its purpose, on its face. Since the renewal of 1997 to 2000, the climb to the top has been sold with the museum ticket.
Movement V
In the year the building opened, Jean Baudrillard published L’effet Beaubourg, and named in it what the building disclosed without meaning to: culture turned into mass attendance, the house of art become a machine for crowds. The building has been one of the most visited in Paris for half a century. Whether it made culture free or made it a show has been argued ever since, and the argument is part of what the building has kept yielding.
The flexibility that justified the inside-out section was never used as promised. The floors were partitioned into rooms within a decade; the moving floors and the great information screens planned for the façade were dropped; the museum galleries were remade in the 1980s in the language of the museum rather than of the frame. From 1997 to 2000 the building was closed and renewed by Piano’s office, with Jean-François Bodin for the museum, and when it reopened the climb to the top had become a ticketed one. A building made to be changed has been changed, and to stand it has needed to be.
Its reach ran from the built thing. High-tech as a movement runs from here, to Rogers’s Lloyd’s building in London and Foster’s Hongkong and Shanghai Bank, both of 1986, and to the expressed frames and services of the two decades after them, with Arup and Rice the engineers of such work. The cultural building as urban event, the line that runs through the grands projets of the 1980s to Bilbao, begins here, and the French state took from it the habit of making its museums by open competition. The style has receded. The type has not, and the questions stay open: machine or monument, and whether flexibility was a promise worth making.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged on structure, purpose and site. The governing idea passes the subtractive test: to give a library, a museum and a centre of industrial design floors without a single column, the structure goes to the edges and the ducts go outside, and the floors are clear. The gerberettes follow from that span: they shorten the girders and turn the outer zone into a carrying zone for services and escalator. The square follows from the purpose, the public ground made the entrance. Much yields. The flexibility that compels the inside-out section was never used as promised: the floors were partitioned within a decade, and the moving floors and great screens on the façade were dropped. And the saturation of the colour code is rhetoric as much as necessity.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Two things can be stated, and hold. That culture can be housed as a public street rather than a temple: no steps up to a portico, no threshold of rank, a square that slopes down to the doors, a free library of open shelves, and a ride up the façade that gives the city to anyone who takes it. That is a statement about who culture is for, made in plan and section, and Paris used the building so. And that a building is a system of structure, air, water, power and movement, which can be shown rather than hidden. Held below the bar because the first claim was announced in the manifesto language of 1971 more than found, and because the building also disclosed what it did not mean to: culture turned into mass attendance, which Baudrillard named l’effet Beaubourg in 1977.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Height is real; frequency is moderate. Elevation comes in the ride up the escalator tube: the square falling away, the roofs of the Marais and Les Halles opening, and at the top Paris laid out from Notre-Dame to Sacré-Cœur and the Eiffel Tower, an ascent given free to the public when the building opened. It comes in the scale of the frame seen from the square, girder and bracket repeated down the length; in the east face at night, the coloured ducts massed like an organ or a refinery against the old street; and in the square itself, a slope of crowd and performance. It is exhilarating, never dreadful, and of one register. Within, the floors are low for their extent, and the building’s best moment lies outside its purpose.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Archetype is built, but of a period more than of the deep. Three figures stand in plan and section. The agora: the square, raked toward the building, the public gathered at the foot of the house of culture. The ascent: the climb on the face of the building from the crowded square to a summit over the whole city, a mountain made of a machine. And the body opened, its organs outside the skin. The square and the climb are load-bearing; they are the building’s use. What holds the axis is depth. The myth built most fully is the machine’s, the factory and the refinery as the image of culture’s democracy, a myth of the 1960s and 1970s; the opened body is an image, not an order; and the house of culture is given no deeper figure than an open, serviced warehouse.
Score: 7.8 / 10
The inheritance: the museum and the library as temple and palace, from the Altes Museum and the British Museum to the modern museum still raised on a podium behind a façade; and in the avant-garde, the paper megastructures of Archigram and Cedric Price’s unbuilt Fun Palace for Joan Littlewood, which had proposed culture as a serviced, changeable frame. The departure: a national institution in the historic heart of Paris built as an exposed frame with no façade in the old sense, services and movement outside, half its site given to a square. The stake: two young architects with little built, chosen by a jury under Jean Prouvé for the state’s flagship, against a hostile press, on cast steel and spans untried at that scale in a public building. Held below the top because the turn was first drawn on paper by others.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Substitute another form and the purpose is lived otherwise. A museum behind a portico is entered by ascent and permission; this one is entered from a sloping square, down to the doors, with the crowd. The visitor’s movement is put on the outside of the building and given the city, so that going to see art is also seeing Paris, and the escalator became one of the city’s public streets. The library’s open floor, free to all, made the building a daily place for students and the unemployed as much as a monument. Held lower by what the form did not carry inside: the column-free floor, the end the whole section was bent to serve, was divided into rooms like rooms in any building, and since 2000 the climb to the top has been sold with the ticket.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Evidence over promise, across about half a century. The building has been returned to by engineers, in Peter Rice’s own account of the gerberettes and of cast steel in An Engineer Imagines (1994); by theory, from Baudrillard’s L’effet Beaubourg (1977) to the long argument over whether it is a monument to democracy or to spectacle; by history, on the Fun Palace and Archigram behind it and on the politics of the commission; and by architects, who read it as the founding of high-tech and have argued over flexibility as a value ever since. The questions stay open: machine or monument, whether flexibility was worth promising, whether the building made culture free or made it a show. Held lower because the record is short and the thesis, once grasped, is clear: the building is the diagram it shows.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Standing since 1977, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is a reorganisation of possibility: the cultural building turned from temple to open, serviced frame; structure and services made the expressive matter of architecture; the public building given to a square and to movement. Part of that force is the built realisation of others’ drawings, which holds it below the top. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: high-tech as a movement runs from here, to Rogers’s Lloyd’s building in London (1986) and Foster’s Hongkong and Shanghai Bank (1986), with Arup and Rice the engineers of such work; the cultural building as urban event, the line through the grands projets of the 1980s to Bilbao, begins here; and the French state’s habit of making its museums by open competition was set by it. The style has receded; the type has not.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence and use, then fabric, over forty-nine years. The form survives whole: frame, gerberettes, ducts, escalator tube and square are as designed and legible, and the building has outlived the cultural policy and the high-tech moment that produced it without reading only as a period piece, though it reads partly as one. Presence has been continuous and very wide. The charges are on fabric and use. The exposed steel and services weathered fast, and after some twenty years the building closed for a full renovation, from 1997 to 2000; the free public climb was given up when it reopened; the inside has been remade more than once. A building made to be changed has been changed, and to stand it has needed to be.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Judged as command of building, structure and engineering included. The structural making is load-bearing and of the first rank: the gerberette, a cast-steel rocker that takes the girder on one arm and the tie on the other, so that the frame works by balance and the columns carry nearly pure compression; long lattice girders delivering a clear floor; cast steel, an industrial material long abandoned in building, brought back as a crafted, almost hand-made joint, which Rice argued was the point. The long faces, frame, bracing and the escalator’s diagonal, are ordered and legible. The costs are the makers’: an envelope and external services that decayed fast in weather, the thermal performance of a glass box with its ducts outside, ordinary interiors under low ducted ceilings, and the flexibility never delivered as a working system. Command of the frame outran command of the enclosure.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the east face to the rue du Renard, a wall of coloured ducts and stacks, and the west face to the square, a glass tube of moving people. They obey one law: whatever serves or moves is put outside the clear volume, in the zone the gerberettes carry, and coded by what it carries. Air, water, power and people become the same kind of thing, and the whole length obeys one bay and one joint. The square obeys it too, the open floor carried outdoors as open ground. Held below the top on two counts. The law is one register, narrow in material and mood, and narrowness is not coherence. And inside, since the 1980s, a second law of rooms and walls has governed the galleries.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Six orders are held: the city, approached from its streets, given a square and shown to itself from the top; the civic public, on the square and in the free library; the arts and knowledge, modern art, books, design, music and film in one frame; technology, the machine and its services as the building’s matter; the state, a president’s commission that bears his name; and information, the library and the centre made for the flow of knowledge. One section places each: the public at the foot, the arts on the floors, the machine at the edges, the city at the summit. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: the sacred, death, the family, labour as a subject, the natural order, and history except as the old city seen around it. The figure describes the form.
Score: 7.3 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.4 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Swerve and Pressure on Tradition at 9.1, then The Made and The Inner Law at 8.6. A national institution in the heart of Paris built as an exposed, serviced frame by two architects with almost nothing built, on cast steel and spans untried at that scale; a reach that runs through high-tech and the cultural building as urban event; a structural making of the first rank, the gerberette holding the frame in balance; and one law, whatever serves or moves put outside and coded, governing both long faces and the square.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.3: the city, the civic public, the arts and knowledge, technology, the state and information are placed in one section, and the sacred, death, the family, labour, the natural order and history are absent. Below the rest, The Archetypal Deep at 7.8 and The Inevitable at 8.0: the agora and the ascent are built, but the myth built most fully is a period’s myth of the machine; and the flexibility that compels the inside-out section was never used. The facts are one: the building turned its field by what it showed, and what it showed was a diagram of its own decade.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.0 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Inner Law at 8.6, The Made at 8.6, The Living Form at 8.5, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Swerve at 9.1 and Pressure on Tradition at 9.1 clear the bar of 8.5, and The Imperishable meets it exactly at 8.5, but The Unconcealment at 8.2 and The Archetypal Deep at 7.8 fall short. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis it governs falls below 7.8, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.3. The aggregate of 8.4 stands below the summit’s 9.0 in any case.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the building as it stands and of its documented plan, section, structure and history. The work scored is the Centre national d’art et de culture Georges Pompidou as one: the building on the Plateau Beaubourg with the sloping square on its west side, which the design made part of the scheme. Under the rule that all one work includes what was built or added in its life, the interior fit-outs are part of it and are scored with it: the museum galleries remade in the 1980s and the renewal of 1997 to 2000 by Piano’s office, with Jean-François Bodin for the museum, which also made the ride to the top a ticketed one. What now stands is the frame, the gerberettes, the east-face services, the escalator and the square as designed, with interiors remade more than once and fabric renewed; repair and renewal are weighed under The Imperishable alone. The design is credited to Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers with Gianfranco Franchini, and the structure to Ove Arup & Partners, with Peter Rice and Edmund Happold; collaboration is not charged. Context only, and not credited: IRCAM and its later tower beside the Place Stravinsky, the Stravinsky Fountain by Jean Tinguely and Niki de Saint Phalle (1983), the reconstructed Atelier Brancusi on the square, the collections, and the branches at Metz and elsewhere. Nothing is quoted. The only words on the page that are not the desk’s are names and titles: the gerberette, named for Heinrich Gerber’s hinged beam; the chenille; Baudrillard’s L’effet Beaubourg (1977); and Rice’s An Engineer Imagines (1994). Facts that could not be verified, among them the dimensions of the block, the clear span and the bay, where the gerberettes were cast, the number of entrants to the competition, the number of visitors the building was designed for and has received, any comparison drawn by its makers with older squares, the dates and scope of works after 2000, and the reasons for them, are not given.