Pompidou Center – Beaubourg

Richard Rogers e Renzo Piano – Pompidou Center – Beaubourg, Paris France, 1971-1977

The Georges Pompidou National Center for Art and Culture is located in Paris, on Rue Beaubourg 19. In French it is also known as Beaubourg. The building project is the work of Piano, Franchini and Rogers. Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers managed the project on their own.

The Center was born from the will of Georges Pompidou, president of the French Republic from 1969 to 1974, who wanted to create in the heart of Paris a cultural institution characterized by multidisciplinarity, entirely dedicated to modern art, which was also accompanied by a vast library public, a museum of design, music, film and audio-visual activities.

The Pompidou Center was designed by Gianfranco Franchini, Renzo Piano, Richard Rogers and Susanne "Su" Rogers, along with the British engineer Edmund Happold and the Irish structural engineer Peter Rice. The awarding of the first prize to this group of young people in the 1971 competition was a general surprise.

The different colors of the external pipes of the Pompidou Center elevation are differentiated according to their use:
OOOO Yellow for electricity
OOOO Red for elevators and escalators
OOOO Green for water
OOOO Blue for air

The New York Times, on the occasion of Rogers' victory of the Pritzker Prize in 2007, wrote that the design of the center "overturned world architecture". Since its construction, the boldly colored building with an obvious structure has become one of the symbols of 20th century architecture.