Centre Pompidou

Stand at the top of the sloping square and feel the ground tilt gently under your feet. The paving runs downhill toward the building, like a beach running down to the sea. Ahead of you, a wall of pipes rises from the stone. They are painted blue, green, yellow and red, and they are bolted to the outside of the building. Most buildings hide their pipes and wires inside the walls. This one shows all of them.

This is the Centre Pompidou. Parisians often call it simply Beaubourg, after the old neighbourhood around it. It opened in 1977. It was named after Georges Pompidou, the French president who pushed for a new cultural centre in the heart of Paris. He did not live to see it finished. He died in 1974, while it was still being built. So the building carries the name of a man who never walked through its doors.

Before we go further, there is one important thing you should know. In 2025, the centre closed for a long renovation. It is expected to reopen around 2030. Depending on when you are listening, you may see scaffolding, fences or construction work instead of open doors. The art collection has been lent to museums in France and abroad while the work goes on. But the story of this building is still here, in the steel and the square in front of you.

The design came from an international competition held in 1971. Hundreds of architects from around the world sent in entries. The winners were two young architects with very little experience — Renzo Piano from Italy and Richard Rogers from Britain, working with the Italian architect Gianfranco Franchini. Both Piano and Rogers later became two of the most respected architects of their generation. Here, at the start of their careers, they had an idea that shocked almost everyone.

Their idea was simple. They took everything a building normally hides — the ducts, the pipes, the escalators, the steel frame — and moved it to the outside. That left the inside free. Each floor could become one huge open space, with no fixed walls. Galleries could be rebuilt and rearranged for every new exhibition. The building was meant to change, like a tool, and not to sit still like a monument.

Now look closely at those colours, because they are a code. Blue pipes carry air for heating and air conditioning. Green pipes carry water. Yellow ones hold the electrical systems. And red is for movement — the lifts and the parts that carry people up and down. Once you know the code, you can read the whole building like a map. Many visitors walk past for years without knowing that the colours have a meaning.

When it opened, many people hated it. Critics compared it to an oil refinery or a factory dropped into the old city. Some people wanted it torn down. Then something unexpected happened. Visitors came in very large numbers — far more than the planners had imagined. Within a few years, the strange machine on the square had become one of the most visited cultural places in Paris.

Part of the reason was the great escalator. On the side of the building that faces the square, a long transparent tube climbs diagonally across the front. Inside it, escalators carry people up from floor to floor. Locals nicknamed it the caterpillar. As you ride up, the city opens out below you. At the top, the rooftop gives a wide view across Paris roofs. On a clear day, you can pick out the white domes of Sacré-Cœur on its hill to the north, and the Eiffel Tower far to the west.

Inside, this centre was never only a museum. It held the National Museum of Modern Art, with one of the largest collections of modern and contemporary art in Europe. Works by artists such as Picasso, Matisse and Kandinsky were shown here. It also held a large public library, open to anyone, where students queued along the street to find a seat. Nearby, an institute for music and sound research works underground, below the square. The idea was to bring art, books and music together under one roof.

The square itself is part of the design. Before the centre was built, this area was a crowded old district. Much of it was cleared in the twentieth century, and for years the empty ground served as a car park. The architects gave half of the site to an open public space. For decades, street performers, musicians, painters and jugglers have gathered here. It is one of the few large squares in central Paris where people simply sit on the ground and watch the city go by.

Walk a short way along the south side of the building and you will find something playful. In a shallow pool, colourful sculptures turn, spray and spin. This is the Stravinsky Fountain, made by two artists, Jean Tinguely and Niki de Saint Phalle, who were partners in life as well as in art. It is named after the composer Igor Stravinsky. Tinguely made the black moving machines. Saint Phalle made the bright figures — a fat red pair of lips, a bird, a snake. Each sculpture refers to a piece of Stravinsky's music.

There is one more detail many people miss. On the edge of the square stands a small, low building. It holds a reconstruction of the studio of Constantin Brancusi, a Romanian sculptor who lived and worked in Paris. He left his studio and its contents to the French state. The rebuilt studio shows his sculptures arranged the way he kept them, in the light he chose. It was designed by Renzo Piano, the same architect who helped create the great machine beside it.

The Pompidou idea has also travelled. In the east of France, the city of Metz opened its own Centre Pompidou in 2010, under a white roof that looks a little like a woven hat. Other branches have opened abroad. The renovation here aims to repair the steel, the glass and the systems, which have worked hard for nearly fifty years. A building designed to show its machinery also shows its age, and that machinery now needs care.

Before you walk on, stand still for a moment and look up again. Follow one blue pipe with your eyes, from the ground to the roof. Listen to the square around you — the voices, the footsteps, perhaps a guitar somewhere near the fountain. When this building arrived, people said it did not belong in Paris. Today it is hard to picture the city without it. As you leave, glance back once more at the colours. You now know what each one carries.