Centre Pompidou

When Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers won the international competition to design a new arts centre for Paris, they proposed something no city had seen before: turn the building inside out. Structural steel, escalators, air ducts and pipework were pushed onto the exterior and colour-coded by function, freeing the interior into vast, flexible, column-free floors that could be reconfigured for any exhibition. When the centre opened in 1977 in the historic Beaubourg quarter, conservative Paris was scandalised, and critics mocked it as a refinery or an oil rig dropped beside the ancient rooftops. Within a decade or two, though, the building had become one of the most influential works of late 20th-century architecture, a founding statement of the high-tech style that Piano and Rogers would carry into projects around the world.

The centre exists because of President Georges Pompidou, an enthusiastic champion of contemporary art who commissioned the project in 1969 hoping to give Paris a museum as bold as the art it held. He died in 1974, three years before construction finished, and never saw the building that would carry his name. Inside, the Musée National d'Art Moderne assembled Europe's largest collection of twentieth- and twenty-first-century art, with major holdings of Matisse, Picasso, Kandinsky and Warhol among thousands of other works, alongside a public library and IRCAM, the institute for music and acoustic research founded alongside the centre by composer Pierre Boulez.

Visitors used to reach the upper floors by a glass tube escalator that zigzags diagonally up the entire west facade, turning the ride itself into one of the best free views in Paris — climbers watched the rooftops of the Marais unfold behind them, with Sacré-Cœur and the Eiffel Tower on the skyline. The escalator became as much a piece of the design as the coloured pipework, an attraction visitors sought out even if they had no interest in the art inside.

Few visitors realise how experimental the whole building was for its moment: nothing on this scale had ever put a structure's mechanical guts on public display as ornament, and engineers had to invent new techniques just to keep the exposed steel from corroding in the open air. That willingness to expose what buildings normally hide is exactly what made the centre so contentious in 1977 and so celebrated ever since.

The Centre Pompidou closed in 2025 for a major structural renovation and is not expected to reopen until 2030. The closure covers the entire building — galleries, library and public spaces alike — so there is currently nothing to visit on site, and travellers should not plan a stop here until reopening is confirmed closer to the date.

Before the closure, the centre's free public library and the panoramic views from its upper floors were among the most popular reasons to visit even without a museum ticket, and both are expected to return in some form once the renovation is complete. Until then, check the official Centre Pompidou website for updates on the reopening date and on temporary exhibitions the collection may be hosting elsewhere in Paris.