Since January the remodelled Centre Pompidou again lies like a multicoloured passenger ship in the leaden sea of Paris roofs. When it was completed in 1977, it was an expression of the democratizing of knowledge and culture. After twenty years of intensive use, the time was felt to be ripe to reformulate its function. Ideals wear out faster than buildings, but it's hard to 'doctor' masterpieces.
Is the renovation an adaptation to present-day requirements? Or does it express the disillusions of the '68 generation? A report on a 'renovation', or how utopia was recast as a monument.

The make-over, which took 27 months and cost 88 million Euro, was carried out by Renzo Piano and Jean-Frangois Bodin: Richard Rogers stayed out of it. Strikingly little, but unobtrusively much has been altered. All the technical services have been renovated. Banishing the administration from the building has provided 8000 m2 extra floor space. The three big departments-the Forum, the library and the museum - now have internal lifts, escalators and stairs. Piano enhanced the Forum, the triple-height entrance hall, and reduced the opening to the basement floors; he also added auditoriums and created sales outlets. The major intervention however was Bodin's.
He built an enclosed shaft housing double escalators and lifts linking the three storeys of the library, which has been extended to seat 2000. Bodin was also responsible for the permanent walls and enclosed spaces for the museum on the fourth floor which has been expanded from 9500 to 14,000 m2, and where 3.18% rather than 2% of the 44,000 art works stored in the reserves can be displayed. Piano designed square pools for the terraces, placing them between the visitors and the view of the city, 'to create a prestigious setting'. The sixth floor comprises three exhibition galleries, and a pricey restaurant has replaced the scruffy cafeteria. In addition, throughout the entire complex the grey floor-covering has made way for beige concrete, parquet or white synthetic resin. The words best summarizing an initial conclusion are update, neue sachlichkeit and going commercial.

A matter of principle

Why did Richard Rogers distance himself from the renovation so vehemently in his press release of 10 January? With the exception of the brightened colours and the valuable gallery space freed by moving the administration, Rogers says that the refurbishment causes him 'great sadness', even describing it as 'tragic' that the two key architectural innovations of 1977 have been 'irreversibly damaged' by changes that disregard the 'true nature' of Beaubourg. The two innovations in question were flexibility in use and the open flow of floor space achieved by removing all vertical circulation and loadbearing structures to the facades; a public space was generated from that facade by having an escalator act as a raked 'street'. The staircase which has now been added cancels the principle of free-floor planning and keeps visitors away from the facade. Rogers believes it will 'dramatically reduce the dynamic interaction' between the public and the city. The renovation could therefore have a negative effect on the architectural, functional and ideological principles underlying the original scheme.
There had already been signs hinting of changes in the 'Beaubourg idea'. The Atelier Brancusi, which Piano placed beside the building in 1997, was a curious little monument whose sandstone walls do little credit to either Beaubourg or Brancusi. In 1998 a gilded flowerpot by France's official avant-garde artist Jean-Pierre Raynaud was sited in the middle of the plaza on a marble pedestal several metres high. So now in the vision of the National Museum of Modern Art art contemporain towers high above ordinary mortals, on an inaccessible, irrefutable and above all monumental pedestal.
That monumentality has become a key concept was also apparent from the words of the director Jean-Jacques Aillagon, who stated in 1997 that Beaubourg should once more become a place of 'excellence, exemplariness and international cachet'.-However, these were not concepts used at the outset but new ones applied à la lettre to the revamp.
In 1969-1970, the then French president Georges Pompidou set out the original points of departure. He had been considering a Centre Culturel since the early sixties. True, in the letter in which Pompidou announced his project on 1 December 1969, he referred to a 'monumental' centre for contemporary art. But the president left the architectural choice to a jury chaired by Jean Prouve and including Willem Sandberg. And they opted for a building that denied on all sides the idea of a monument. It was to be a flexible system, with spaces and storeys that were able to adapt; the building's form should comply with the types of activities to take place there. Piano and Rogers, thinking they had little chance of winning the competition, pushed their ideas to extremes in their radical project. A part of their overall vision was the facade filled with people as a mirror of the bustling square, the piazza. Visitors took the escalator past a section through the building where they were free to enter somewhere, or nowhere, to be just passers-by, turning their back on culture and enjoying the slowly unfolding cityscape. Since January the facade is no longer public space: it is reserved for museum visitors, because now an entrance fee is charged. It has become an attendant-operated conveyor belt, by which the happy few, for whom neither museum doors nor money constitute barriers, are slowly elevated above the city. Enthusiasm, daring, liberty, innovation and flexibility have made way for 'excellence, exemplariness and international cachet'.

The end of an era

Piano regrets this limitation too, but refers stoically to 'the end of an era', describing Beaubourg as 'an idea by badly brought up schoolchildren'. Unlike Rogers, Piano has distanced himself from the original Beaubourg; in his book Chantier ouvert au public (1985) he in fact calls it a 'monument' on several occasions. He emphasizes, for good reason, the fact that Beaubourg's architecture relates to the 19th-century architectural tradition of iron structures, of the Eiffel Tower and Baltard's Halles (now demolished). Rogers is still the more city-focused and city-committed architect; Piano the brilliant and flexible engineer, who likes to place his work within a tradition. The recent exhibition at Beaubourg dedicated to Piano's work presents him as a clever aesthete, concerned with concepts like 'silence', 'isolation', 'sensitivity'. His studio in Genoa is on a mountainside, with a cable-car forming the only link with the outside world.
Is it really a coincidence that the many criticasters at the opening of the Centre Pompidou are now being pandered to? In the broadsheet Beaubourg et le monde renverse (1985), Jean Clair condemned the Centre's culture of the masses and free admittance. Baudrillard denounced in his I'effet Beaubourg of 1977 the popular activities, which, he believed, would mean that 'our culture would never be one of permanence'. For Baudrillard the contents of the Centre were the masses themselves, who were subjected there to a treatment resembling the processing of crude oil in a refinery. That anti-humanist view, of culture inevitably being wasted on the plebs, seems to be expressed to a degree in the new Centre.

Conserve or create

The generation which has grown up with Beaubourg has lost the ideals of May '68. In 1970 the buzz word was unlocking disciplines, in 2000 it has been overtaken by the current inclination towards 'cloissoner' - partitioning off public space for separate groups. In the Forum, which is now filled with shops and no longer merits that name, local pensioners and 'clochards' have become undesirable elements. Students heading for the library are already separated in the square into a different queue from paying tourists. After a tour through a sacrosanct 'deambulatorium' of modern art, the museum visitor can dine quietly in a setting highly reminiscent of a Hopper painting, in the restaurant on the top floor with panoramic views of the city. These days the city can neither enter the building, nor get on top of it. The lively dynamic, the rhythm of urban interaction, has been 'renovated out'. It does exist in the Halles close by, where acrobats and groups of street dancers practise among the crowds of shoppers, or in the Grande Halle de la Villette, where improvising ground-breaking forms of culture have found a platform.
The Beaubourg elite, made up of civil servants, does its utmost to convince us that our culture is enduring, that all its many forms deserve respect and quiet. After the revolution, it is time to conserve culture; Georges Pompidou's wish to have studios in which to make art no longer holds. The museum is obliged to pretend that the 44,000 objects in storage today - perhaps hundreds of thousands tomorrow - all have equal value for posterity and can only be shown in a spartan, so-called scientific museological context. No-one believes this anymore, but because it affects one of the most sensitive issues of our culture, namely that culture's intrinsic content and the possibility of transmitting that content to the future through its material production, this is just such a question that could have been posed with and within a centre for contemporary culture. Beaubourg's architecture was geared to adapting its contents to changing requirements, not to protecting a dated contents from the passing of time.

From provocation to compromise

The once so revolutionary Centre has become the victim of a quest for compromise. Rogers stated on French radio that 'Beaubourg no longer belongs to the people', and feared that 'a popular and dynamic machine' had been turned into an 'ossified monument'. How could Piano possibly belittle his early work as a 'provocation' when the recent alterations would seem to be a failure? The answer, of course, is that artists should not return to earlier masterworks. It is as if Willem de Kooning aged seventy were to have touched up Woman I. The history of Beaubourg is typical of the course taken by a utopia of cultural participation and mix of users, residents and tourists, a course that was never fully attained. As a building, it remains an architectural chef-d'oeuvre, the expression of a brief exactly in keeping with its times. At its inception, Beaubourg was a bombshell of a manifesto for urbanist variation, inventiveness and cultural accessibility in formalistic Paris. It has had tremendous influence, as is evident in the descending staircases on the exterior of the still scaffolded Dutch pavilion designed by MVRDV for the Hanover World Expo. Since the renovation, and in view of its history, Beaubourg has played its part as an architectural crowbar between the Cite de la Musique and the Institut du Monde Arabe, the Grande Bibliotheque and Pei's Pyramid. It is a somewhat recent monument that has meanwhile joined the ranks of big museums complete with cinemas, restaurants and shopping centres. And so the city of Paris has lost a vital organ as well as an important symbol.

© Steven Wassenaar