Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.The Centre Pompidou in Paris was intended to be a building embodying change and transformation. A response to the street protests and the radicalism of 1968, it represented an idea of a less elitist, more accessible culture: open, public, responsive and novel. It embraced high and low arts; the avant garde and pop; performance, a public library and a panoply of new media. It has now become, however, like the Louvre, a heavily protected national monument, a heritage building.The Pompidou was also never designed to last hundreds of years — it is a building of its era, heavily serviced and difficult to maintain. Its architect, Renzo Piano (who designed and built it with Richard Rogers between 1971 and 1977) originally proposed that it should be completely overhauled every 25 years.Now nearly 50 years old, it is now about to undergo a huge transformation, its first since the 1990s and its biggest ever. An engineering project to restore the building, repair the structure, remove asbestos and update its services is scheduled to start in 2025. There is controversy over the original budget of €262mn (now looking more like €358mn), with funding as yet incomplete, and artists and cultural figures have expressed outrage at plans to close the Pompidou for five years during the renovations. However, the works will give the opportunity for a rethink of the uses of the building’s vast spaces, many subterranean and hitherto inaccessible.An architectural competition was launched last year for this organisational and artistic reinterpretation of the cultural and administrative spaces, which was won by Paris-based architects Moreau Kusunoki with Mexican/US associate designers Frida Escobedo Studio.While their proposals do not appear particularly radical (there will be no great changes in the appearance of the structure), they are surprisingly extensive. “The idea is to increase access, openness to the city and transparency,” says architect Nicolas Moreau. “There is a rethinking of the entrance, the sequence and the relationship to the city.”Although it looks similar to how it did when it opened in 1977, there have been many changes, especially an accretion of walls, barriers and security checkpoints. After increased fears of terrorism, the escalator that was once a free public spectacle in its own right was put behind security barriers, and the interiors have become progressively less open over the years. “We are trying to open the flow of the ground floor,” Moreau says. “The piazza outside will be made more accessible, replacing steps with a slope, while solid panels on the facade (which were intended in the original designs to be glass but became solid) are being made more transparent using new fireproof glass unavailable in the 1970s.” Additionally, the glass box that houses a replica of artist Constantin Brancusi’s atelier (designed by Piano and completed in 1997) will now house the Kandinsky library, a research facility for the centre’s vast collection of artists’ archives; the studio will move back inside the building. The most extensive element of the plan is the expansion of the basement levels into areas that were formerly workshops or workers’ or storage rooms, creating performance spaces, black-box galleries and two new cinemas. Architect Hiroko Kusunoki says, “Those spaces have a very different character, with no natural light, so they lend themselves to immersive media.” Overall, the plans will lead to an extra 6,600 sq m being opened up to the public (there is now 18,110 sq m of exhibition space).“There is a world down below the building, like a city below the city,” adds Moreau. “There was even a tunnel built to transport art, but it was not built wide enough for trucks so it was never used.” (It will remain unused after the renovation.)The library, one of the centre’s best-used and most democratic spaces, will be extensively refurbished in collaboration with Escobedo. “Over the years the space had consolidated and become more static,” she tells me, “and the idea was to open it up again and make it more porous . . . We are trying to reconfigure the library so that it becomes an archipelago of islands which can adapt — a place for a future which we don’t know yet.”What is it like, I ask Moreau, to be working on a building so familiar and so central to the cultural life of Paris? “It’s like being a heritage architect and getting to work on Notre-Dame,” he says. “In fact they call the Pompidou the ‘Notre-Dame des Tuyaux’” — the cathedral of pipes. As the real Notre-Dame reappears after a restoration necessitated by the 2019 fire, its high-tech counterpart will disappear, perhaps for far longer, under scaffolding.centrepompidou.fr
