Musée National d'Art Moderne

Stand on the sloping stone piazza for a moment and let your eyes adjust. The ground tilts gently down toward the building, like a shallow amphitheatre. Pigeons scatter across the paving. Somewhere a street musician is tuning up. And in front of you rises a structure that looks less like a museum and more like a machine. Pipes, tubes, steel braces, all of it on the outside. This is the Centre Pompidou, and inside it lives the Musée National d'Art Moderne, France's national museum of modern art.

First, an honest note about timing. The Centre Pompidou closed in 2025 for a major renovation, and the work is expected to continue until around 2030. So depending on when you are listening, you may see scaffolding, fences and construction crews instead of open doors. That is fine. The building is still worth studying from the outside, and the story of how this museum came to be here is one of the strangest in Paris. Let us walk through it together.

The museum is older than the building. France created a national museum of modern art in the 1940s, just after the Second World War. For its first decades it lived across the river, in the Palais de Tokyo, a stone building from the 1930s. It was dignified and classical, with columns and long galleries. Then, in 1977, the collection moved here, into one of the most argued-about buildings of the twentieth century.

The idea came from Georges Pompidou, President of France at the end of the 1960s and early 1970s. He wanted a single cultural centre in the heart of Paris. It would hold modern art, a large public library, and spaces for music and design. An international architecture competition followed, and hundreds of teams sent in designs. The winners were two young architects who were little known at the time — Renzo Piano from Italy and Richard Rogers from Britain, working with Gianfranco Franchini. Pompidou died before the building opened, and so it carries his name.

Now look closely at the walls in front of you. Piano and Rogers made a radical choice. They put the building's working parts on the outside. The pipes, ducts and cables that most buildings hide behind plaster are fully visible here. This freed the inside to become huge open floors with almost no columns, which curators could rearrange for every exhibition. The architects called it a flexible container. Many Parisians, at first, called it an oil refinery.

Here is a detail many visitors miss. The colours are not decoration. They are a code. Blue pipes carry air for the climate system. Green pipes carry water. Yellow marks electricity. And red is for movement — the lifts and the systems that move people through the building. Once you know the code, the facade stops looking random. It becomes a diagram of the building, painted in primary colours, readable from the street.

On the side facing the piazza, look for the long transparent tube that climbs diagonally across the facade. Inside it runs a chain of escalators. Locals sometimes call it the caterpillar. Before the renovation, riding it to the top was one of the great free pleasures of Paris. With each level, the rooftops opened wider. At the top, the view reached across grey zinc roofs to Notre-Dame, Sacré-Cœur on its hill, and the Eiffel Tower in the distance.

The neighbourhood itself explains why the building looks so defiant. This area is called Beaubourg, one of the oldest quarters of medieval Paris. Nearby stood Les Halles, the great central food market, which was demolished in the early 1970s. Many Parisians mourned it. The site of this piazza had become a car park. Into this old, narrow, lived-in district, the government dropped a steel and glass structure that looked like nothing around it. The shock was intentional.

So what is inside, behind all that steel? The museum's collection is one of the largest of modern and contemporary art in the world, with well over one hundred thousand works. It runs from the early twentieth century to today. Painting, sculpture, photography, film, design and architecture are all part of it. Before the closure, visitors could walk through rooms of Matisse, Picasso, Braque and Kandinsky, then turn a corner into Surrealism, then into postwar abstraction and video art.

A second surprise: the museum did not build its collection only through purchases. Gifts from artists and their families shaped it deeply. One famous case sits just across the piazza, in a low building to your right. That is the Atelier Brancusi. The Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi left the contents of his Paris studio to the French state, on one condition. The studio had to be rebuilt exactly as he arranged it. The reconstruction you see here was designed by Renzo Piano himself.

The museum also has a sister in eastern France. In 2010, the Centre Pompidou-Metz opened in the city of Metz, under a white roof that curves like a woven hat. It shows works from the Paris collection in rotating exhibitions. During the renovation in Paris, parts of the collection are travelling to partner venues in France and abroad. If you are keen to see the art itself, it is worth checking what the museum is showing elsewhere while its home is closed.

Before you leave, walk to the south side of the building. There you will find a shallow pool filled with strange moving sculptures. This is the Stravinsky Fountain, made by the artists Jean Tinguely and Niki de Saint Phalle and named after the composer Igor Stravinsky. Tinguely made the black mechanical pieces. Saint Phalle made the bright, round, colourful figures — a pair of red lips, a bird, a snake. The jets spray water in playful arcs. The fountain carries the same spirit as the museum — serious art that refuses to be solemn.

Take one last look at the facade from the edge of the piazza. Notice how the old stone houses around you, with their shutters and small balconies, frame this enormous coloured machine. Half a century later, the contrast still feels fresh. Listen to the voices, the footsteps, the water from the fountain. Whether the doors are open or closed today, this square is still one of the places where Paris argues with itself about what art should look like. And as you walk away, you might notice that the argument is still going on.