Encountering the Centre Pompidou set me on the path to architecture, and its liberative potential, recalls Philip Gumuchdjian
My damascene moment came in 1978, after a small beer and omelette in a cafe on the Rue Saint-Denis. Slightly light-headed I stepped out of the cafe and entered what was to become the rest of my life.
I was not an architect nor studying to be one. I was an economist and art historian and I had ambitions to be a curator. I had travelled to Paris by coach to visit a new museum of modern art and was eager to see the enormous twentieth-century collection that it was exhibiting. Inconceivable today, but in the pre-internet 1970s, it was perfectly possible to have heard about a new museum but not to have seen a single image of it.
As I turned a final corner, my eyes jumped out on stalks and I felt a blow to my stomach that initiated a steep intake of breath”
As I turned a final corner, my eyes suddenly jumped out on stalks and I felt a blow to my stomach that initiated a steep intake of breath. The Centre Pompidou was a building like no other that I had ever seen or dreamt of. Moreover it was slap-bang in the heart of a traditional city surrounded by old buildings. In one single moment I understood that the most omnipresent and immoveable backdrop to everyday life could in fact be radically changed and could catalyse revisionary thinking. Therefore architecture above all the arts could instigate societal change, and architecture could modify that most tangible embodiment of reality: the city.
The enthusiasm and strength of reaction was greatly due to my limited age and experience. My parents had lived through the destructive years of the second world war and idealistic post-war reconstruction. Yearning for stability, they were dismayed by both. But my young mind saw the city with its mixture of old and new buildings and its derelict sites, as the immoveable backdrop to everyday life, a scenery that epitomised the establishment itself, literally and metaphorically petrified and thereby unassailable.
Here before my very eyes was the evidence of a new way of thinking, of a broader-minded society that, like the art that was exhibited or the punk movement back home, was openly clashing with the status quo and opening up new ideas, new forms of perceptions, new social relationships and new hopes.
As I walked towards the building and into the swirling activity within its piazza I was set alight. Never before had I experienced a public space of such vitality. As a Londoner, public space was to do with pomp and the formal celebration of national achievement. They were spaces that were occasionally disrupted by disgruntled students or workers’ marches, and always under the watchful eyes of the police.
The Pompidou Centre taught me that public space could be for the celebration of humanity rather than of national power”
The Pompidou Centre taught me in one moment that public space could be a place for fun and celebration, conviviality and flirtation, for the celebration of humanity rather than of national power.
That experience of the Centre Pompidou led to my bluffing my way into an apprenticeship at the Richard Rogers Partnership and to collaborating with Richard over two decades on developing and advocating his ideas and philosophy in exhibitions, books and idealistic proposals for London. I still firmly believe that architects have an crucial role to promote visions of social and environmental change.
Renzo Piano regularly refers to their work at the Centre Pompidou as “young men’s architecture”. For me it stands alone as the single greatest built expression of youthful, restless, passionate, optimism and of the power of architecture to effect change.
