Next month will mark the 29th anniversary of the construction of the Georges Pompidou Center in Paris. The building that caused a minor commotion when it was unveiled in 1977, is now hailed as one of the most daring art museums in the world. But what, if anything, has been the lasting contribution this building has made to culture and the arts, and what does it say of the role architecture has to play alongside the arts and politics?
The Center was conceived as ‘rescue remedy’ for the arts in Paris, and therefore throughout the Republic. The touted idea was simple, erect a building that would draw the masses to the arts making them both accessible to everyone, in accordance with the egalitarian ideals on which the nation had been founded since the Revolution.
The Center, with its color-coded pipes, external escalator, and huge open rooms, was unlike anything that had come before. Predictably critics panned it. But as it attracted growing numbers of visitors (allegedly 6 million in its first year), eager to see the works of French and world masters on display in chronological order, attitudes softened and soon praise was heaped on both architecture and architects. The building also houses an impressive library, and was designed so that the services and facilities that it houses could be used by Parisians who did not come simply to browse.
After an initial false start, it was a political success. The government swiftly took full credit for the vision and symbolism of the building as a center for the people and metaphysical harbinger of success.
At the time of the Center’s 25th anniversary, Giles Worsley wrote in the UK’s Telegraph newspaper, “The Guggenheim in Bilbao and the stream of major Lottery-funded landmark projects built in the belief that innovatively designed cultural buildings can be the catalyst to urban regeneration are all following the trail first blazed by the Pompidou Centre.”
The key word in Worsley’s statement is belief, because according to him the notion that cultural buildings regenerate culture is false. “…When the Pompidou Centre was commissioned, Paris’s cultural stock was in sharp decline,” he writes. “The Pompidou Centre did nothing to reverse that decline. For all its architectural radicalism, it has not infused new energy into French culture. Visitors come to see its outstanding collection of classic modern art…Almost without exception, what is of interest had been created before 1971.”
The urban regeneration it is claimed cultural buildings support, is also primarily the creatively barren service infrastructure needed to support, or prey on, legions of marauding tourists that flock to admire such structures and the historic exhibitions they house, touted in flyers laid out in every hotel.
Having a funky new ‘cultural centre’ is not a precursor for creativity, nor would it seem to be the thing that nurtures creative innovation. In the last century it was radicalism of mind and spirit, not the built environment, that inspired modernist thinkers and artists.
By contrast, architecture has long been the preserve of a powerful and conservative elite. Who else but governments, corporations, and the mega-rich can commission the structures that dominate public space? When a public building is erected the fact of its construction underlines the power and ideology of those who built it, regardless of the metaphysical references its form might contain. Rhetorical assertions like those espoused by President Chirac, that modern architecture reflects ‘a [new] spirit of openness, a sensitivity to new expectations from the public that have accompanied and driven forward changes in their references, models and sources of initiation’, could even go down as well as the wine during polite conversation at a dinner party, but they have no place in any serious discourse about the nature of politics and power. Just ask the rioters still smarting in the outlying suburbs of Paris.
Having an iconic cultural centre might be good for attracting tourists, without resultant benefits for the local economy, and it may also reinforce the political status-quo, but it does not benefit the arts, per se.
Iconic building or not, any museum or public gallery that is genuinely committed to promoting contemporary art must do so by displaying the works of contemporary artists. The Tate Modern in Britain is a great example of a run-down building re-vamped and used for the purpose for which it was conceived. As Worsley points out, “…it is ironic that the modern art revolution, which transformed the way we look at the world, flowered in a city that had barely changed since the 19th century. And that when Paris finally saw a building of equivalent revolutionary intent, it served not to enliven art but to entomb it.”
