The Centre Pompidou, which is the third most visited cultural site in Paris, is set to close for five years for a complete overhaul. The modern art center, which includes galleries, a library, and a restaurant, is known for its unique exterior made up of pipes and conduits. The building, which has been enchanting art and architecture fans for 50 years, will undergo repairs and construction work to ensure its future. The refurbishment project, which includes modernization and asbestos removal, is estimated to cost 260 million euros ($282 million). France's minister of culture, Rima Abdul Malak, announced the project earlier this month, stating that it will "perpetuate its survival".
Initially set to close in September 2023, the closure has been postponed until after the Summer Olympics, scheduled to take place in Paris in 2024. The Pompidou, named after former French President Georges Pompidou, attracts several million visitors each year and offers one of the best views of the city.
The renovation project aims to reinvent the "original utopia" of the Centre Pompidou while responding to cultural, societal, and environmental challenges of the coming years. Laurent Le Bon, the landmark's president, told CNN that one of the highlights of the renovation will be a brand new 1,500-square-meter terrace with views over the west of the city. The work will also help reduce the center's energy bill by 60%. "We are probably one of the most energy-consuming buildings in France, so this is rather good news," Le Bon said.
While the Centre Pompidou is closed for renovation, visitors will still be able to access some of its highlights. The center's 400,000 books from its public library will move to Le Lumière, a temporary site in Paris's Bercy district, while artworks from its National Modern Art Museum will be exhibited across Paris, wider France, and abroad.
Designed by architects Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers, who went on to create some of the most famous buildings of the past 50 years, the Centre Pompidou was built on a former parking lot. Pompidou himself was inspired by art museums across the Atlantic. "I would like, passionately, for Paris to have a cultural center such as they have tried to create in the United States with unequal success so far, which would be both a museum and a center of creation," he said in an interview with Le Monde newspaper in 1972.
Critics were initially skeptical of the architectural plans featuring external tubes and pipes, saying that the blue, red, and green pipes and nautical architecture would clash with the classic Haussmannian look of the City of Lights. "It was nicknamed the ocean liner, the refinery, Our Lady of the Pipes," recalls Laurent Le Bon. "When it came out of the ground in the heart of Paris - we're really in historic Paris, in the Marais - it caused an aesthetic shock."
However, in the span of half a century, the building that French poet Francis Ponge described as "a heart, a muscle, a pump breathing in and out in continuous beats" became a national landmark. It was meant to be a space that would live and breathe with its time, "not so much a monument, more, to invent a word, a moviment," he wrote in his booklet "L’Écrit Beaubourg" in 1977.