TIME EUROPE
FEBRUARY 7, 2000 VOL. 155 NO. 5
Plus Ça Change
The renovation of the Centre Pompidou has been almost as controversial as was the original design
By NICHOLAS LE QUESNE Paris
At the dawn of a new millennium, it's reassuring to note that some things never change. When French President Jacques Chirac was due to unveil a refurbished Centre Pompidou on Jan. 11, the event had to be canceled when some members of the staff walked out on strike. A few days later the crisis had been solved, but the glitch was a reminder of the cultural center's lasting ability to attract invective, diatribe and debate.
When the Centre Pompidou first opened in 1977, criticism focused on its unorthodox exterior. Today--after a 27-month, $89 million refit--the misgivings are less over how it looks than the way it is run. The management has expanded the role of private patrons and has farmed out shops and cafés to commercial franchises. Administrative offices have been moved to a nearby side street, freeing an extra 8,000 square meters for cultural activities. "We're trying to make sure the center remains rooted in the artistic creation of today," says its president, Jean-Jacques Aillagon.
Back in the '70s, the idea was to create a multidisciplinary workshop open to all, in contrast to the stuffy museums of the time. That ideal was reflected in the building designed by Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano--an irreverent send-up of what a museum should look like. But times have changed. Today's art scene routinely blurs the boundaries between disciplines in a way that was still dangerously new when the Centre Pompidou first opened its doors. Museums all over the world have taken up the standard of radical modernity, while the Center's programming became increasingly classical and academic. After 20 years of activity, the enfant terrible had become part of the establishment.
So what does the Centre Pompidou still have to offer? "We're the only institution in the world where a big museum, a big library and a big center for musical research coexist in the same space and can take part in joint projects," Aillagon says. The problem was that many of its visitors couldn't have cared less. As one of Paris' premier tourist attractions, the building was having to cope with over four times the 5,000 visitors a day originally planned for. In a city whose university libraries are notoriously inadequate, half of the visitors were students coming to work in the library. Only an eighth of the total ever set foot in the museum itself. Many did no more than take the famous escalator up the building's façade to admire the view from the top.
The remodeled Centre Pompidou aims to change all that. From the outside, the building is unaltered. Resplendent after its first paint job in 20 years, it is the same familiar symphony of periscope-style air vents and blue and green ducts soaring vertiginously into the Paris sky. But cross the threshold, and the center's cavernous Forum has been transformed. The threadbare brown carpet has disappeared, replaced by austere concrete slabs. The open cutaway that looked down onto the lower level has been converted into an orthodox access well, servicing the four refitted performance spaces that now occupy the building's basement. Symmetrical metal mezzanines to left and right house a design shop and café. The overall impression is sparser and more rectilinear than before, with an increased sense of height and volume.
In Rogers and Piano's original blueprint, the tubular caterpillar that zigzags up the building's façade acted as a central concourse giving access to the various functional areas. Today it is a simple escalator leading paying customers to the Musée national d'art moderne and the sixth floor, with its temporary exhibition spaces and restaurant. The refurbished library that occupies the entire second and third floors is still free, but now has its own entrance behind the design shop. This separation has angered many, with Richard Rogers declaring that the center is no longer "a building for the people."
The redesigned museum now occupies the entire fourth and fifth floors, gaining an additional 4,500 square meters and displaying 1,400 works compared to the previous 800. The center's administrators like to describe it as rivaling New York's Museum of Modern Art as the world's greatest collection of contemporary art and obviously felt they had an underexploited asset on their hands. Visitors entering the fourth floor find themselves in the midst of the contemporary collection, from 1960 to the present. There is a new emphasis on installations, while architecture, design and photography are given a pride of place denied them in the museum's previous incarnation.
The refurbished fifth floor offers a breathtaking journey through the great experiments in art of the 20th century. It is easy to quibble with details of curator Werner Spies' choices--the eight rooms given over to Surrealism and the dutiful but strangely one-sided reading of Dada--but the all-inclusiveness of the collection is a delight. Renzo Piano has reworked the external sculpture terraces into rectangular expanses of dark gray water whose rippling surface reflects the geometric lines of the building's skeleton. Jean-François Bodin has divided the gallery space into a series of airy white rectangular volumes, with the alleyways between them drawing the eye toward the building's glass external walls and the city beyond: Paris itself has become one of the museum's exhibits.
That's fitting, since the Centre Pompidou is a quintessentially French institution, with surly staff, street performers and huddles of amateur philosophers. For some mysterious reason, only one door to the museum was functioning last week, leading to much Gallic sighing. A straw poll outside the building showed visitors loving and loathing it in equal measure. But the center has always unleashed passions and started arguments while managing to showcase the essential cultural phenomena of the past century at the same time. After a dazzling facelift, it's good to see it back doing the job it does so well.
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