Behind The Galleries:
Tales of the Unconnected
Blog Archives: #16, #15
The Bad Boys of Architecture and the Beaubourg Fun Palace; How six seismic minutes triggered Lisbon's apocalypse.
24 October 2021
#16: The Bad Boys of Architecture and the Beaubourg Fun Palace.
It's been called “Notre dame de la tuyauterie” (Our Lady of the Pipes) and an "architectural King Kong". Le Monde newspaper called the museum's construction the "rape of Paris". Others said the Pompidou Centre resembled an "oil refinery". Parisian critics pithily observed that some of the best views of the city come from its rooftop, since it’s the only place where you don’t have to look at it.
“I am the Quasimodo of Beaubourg,” said one of its designers. “Every single bolt of the building, I have a sense of why it’s there. And when I see it now I wonder how they could ever have allowed us to do something like that."
President Georges Pompidou, with solidly conservative views and a whiff of bourgeois respectability, was the unlikely inspiration behind the project. In 1969, he declared, “I passionately want Paris to have a cultural centre which will be both a museum and a creative centre".
By then, Paris was no longer the undisputed capital of the art world. Since the 1950's, it had all been happening on the other side of the Atlantic, with the appearance of new avant-garde movements such as the action painting of Jackson Pollock and then in New York, where Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein were shaking up modern art.
Pompidou wanted to reclaim Paris's crown.
(Illustration: Marilyn Monroe by Andy Warhol, 1967.
To the astonishment of many, his great civic project began its life as an open competition.
World-renowned architects Oscar Niemeyer, Jean Prouvé and Philip Johnson formed part of the jury. They received 681 entries.
On 15 July 1971, they formally announced that the winning design, number 493, had been chosen, with an almost unanimous eight out of nine votes.
Design number 493 was the brainchild of two young, unknown architects, an Italian, Renzo Piano (left) and an Englishman Richard Rogers, persuaded by Piano to work with him as partner on the project.
They were not establishment figures in any way: “We were the ‘bad boys’ of architecture”, said Piano. He hid behind a forest of black beard. Rogers wore a railwayman’s blue denim suit and a flower power shirt. They both embodied the ‘Spirit of 1968’, the year of student rioting, mass strikes and the near collapse of the economy.
As soon as he received the news, Piano called Rogers. “Vecchio” he said, (Piano has always called Rogers, who is four years older, “old man”), “are you sitting down? We’ve won the Pompidou . . .”
Their design was about making a place where people could peacefully come together against the backdrop of those turbulent times. What really fired the imagination of the judging panel was that it was the only one which proposed to use half of the space available for the building itself.
The other half would be dedicated to an open piazza where people could gather and talk and from where they would be enticed down into the Centre.
The site chosen for the new Centre was a derelict area in the 4th arrondissement of Paris, an urban wasteland called Beaubourg ("beautiful village") - so called as to mock its narrow and dark passageways. Its slums had been cleared in the 1930’s.
It was neglected and unloved and used as a gigantic open-air car park for the people of Les Halles. Pompidou thought this would an ideal place from which to draw in people to explore art and culture.
Construction began in 1971. By the next year, the whole area had been excavated and foundations were being laid.
The following six years became a battle between establishment politics and ideological architecture.
“Working together on the Pompidou Centre was one of the most exciting experiences of my life. We knew we wanted to create a place for all people, but were young and naïve”, remembers Rogers.
“We were attacked from all sides, but Renzo’s deep understanding of construction and architecture, and his poet’s soul, brought us through.”
The opening of the Centre in January 31, 1977 was greeted by most critics with a chorus of horror.
“Paris has its own monster, just like the one in Loch Ness,” wrote a journalist from Le Figaro.
But the Pompidou Centre was a popular success. Crowds and impromptu street entertainers gathered in the piazza. Visitor numbers were five times predictions. The escalators were a hit. Because of the uniform roof heights of most of Paris’s buildings, and the fact that the Pompidou Centre rises above its neighbours, panoramic vistas revealed themselves as you rode to the top.
Within its walls, the vast cultural complex of the Pompidou Centre housed:
- the National museum of Modern Art, the largest modern art museum in Europe, coming second in the world after MOMA in New York.
- the enormous Public Information Library, popular with Parisians as it opens late.
- the Institute for Acoustic and Musical Research.
- the temporary exhibition halls.
- the bookshop, the design shop and the café.
- the fashionable Georges restaurant and the panoramic terrace.
Piano and Rogers made this possible by freeing up all of the interior space. Each level is an immense empty space the size of two football pitches: 7,500 square meters with no columns, no pipes, no stairs and no walls.
And so this gave rise to the most extraordinary feature of the building: its exterior.
Since its construction, writers have joked that, due to its exoskeleton, it’s impossible to tell when it’s under repair.
Piano and Rogers wanted to free up space inside the building by placing all service equipment outside. That’s why it looks like a building turned inside out.
The architects even gave this external skeleton a colour code: Blue for air conditioning, Green for water, Yellow for electricity, White for underground ventilation and Red for escalators and other areas dedicated to human traffic.
As architect Renzo Piano recalls, he wished to “put the inside outside, and show the inner workings“. The enormous cube was meant to be “a building which will not be a monument but a celebration, a big urban toy“.
Sadly, since the Pompidou Centre reopened in 2000 after a two-year refit, the escalators are no longer free to enter, which dilutes their role in making the centre into a popular fun palace and connecting its life with that of the city.
Exposing the pipes and ducts on the outside doesn’t actually make the centre easier to maintain and alter but considerably increases the amount of surface exposed to the weather.
At the end of 2023, the Pompidou Centre in Paris will close for four years of renovations. It will then undergo a €200 million top-to-bottom overhaul. Administrators hope to reopen the centre in 2027 in time for its 50th anniversary.
Rogers (left) and Piano (seen here together outside the Pompidou in 2017) are still close friends and continue to debate intensely about architecture.
Their extraordinary creation has become a much-loved Parisian landmark, “not a building," as Piano says, "but a town where you find everything – lunch, great art, a library, great music”.
Time is running out to visit it before it closes its doors for four long years.
Allons-y!
16 June 2021
#15: How six seismic minutes triggered Lisbon's apocalypse.
Illustration by North Wind Picture Archives
A crisp, cloudless morning greeted Portugal's magnificent capital city, Lisbon, on All Saints' Day, November 1st 1755. After the raucous excess of Hallowe'en the night before, the city's devotedly Catholic citizens made their way to the many cathedrals and churches around the city to praise God and confess their sins.
In the eighteenth century, there was a deep divide between rich and poor in Lisbon's population, estimated to be between 200,000 and 275,000. Portugal was still a world power and its capital was a centre of international trade. Gold had been discovered in Portugal's most lucrative remaining colony, Brazil, in the 1690s and this was followed by the discovery of diamonds there in the 1720s. The majority of the resulting riches was owned by the Crown, though Portuguese merchants also became wealthy. However, this disparity did not dilute the faith of its less fortunate citizens. Thousands of candles were lit for morning service on this Saturday and by 9am most of the city's churches were full of worshippers from every level of society.
In this engraving, an artist has illustrated what Lisbon, Portugal, looked like just before the earthquake of 1755 struck.
At 9.40am, every church bell in the city eerily began to ring, unaided by human hand. Churchgoers instinctively gripped the pews in front of them as the earth beneath their feet began to rock and tremble. Candlesticks tumbled, lecterns fell, rivers of dust poured upon their heads and a pulverising roar filled the hushed spaces with mortal terror.
The shaking lasted for up to six minutes. Churches were rent asunder and collapsed. Helpless congregations choked and screamed as they were buried under massive blocks of falling rubble and masonry.
Photograph of the Carmo Convent, established in the 15th Century, ruined in the earthquake. It still stands as a reminder of the terrible events of that day. (Image Copyright © All Rights Reserved. Simon Cousins 2021)
Throughout the city, yawning fissures up to 16 feet wide opened up and snaked through the narrow thoroughfares. As hundreds of people ran out into the streets, buildings of all kinds shuddered, split and caved in on top of them. A significant aftershock hit around 10am, causing more widespread death and devastation.
Illustration: the ruins of Lisbon Cathedral
The epicentre of this catastrophic earthquake (marked with a red star on the map) is estimated to have been 180 miles south west of Lisbon. Modern research indicates that the main seismic source was faulting of the seafloor along the tectonic plate boundaries of the mid-Atlantic. According to author Mark Muskie, the earthquake, with a magnitude of between 8.5 to 9 using the moment magnitude scale, released 475 megatons of energy: the equivalent of 32,000 Hiroshima atomic bombs. It was the largest earthquake to hit Europe in the last 10,000 years.
Soon after the earthquake, several fires broke out, mostly started by candles and cooking fires. Many inhabitants fled from their homes and left fires burning. Narrow streets full of fallen debris prevented access to the fire sites.
Within minutes the fire had spread, turning Lisbon into a raging inferno. Unable to run, hundreds of patients in the Hospital Real burned to death. The public squares filled with people and their rescued belongings, but as the fire approached, these squares were abandoned, and the fire reached cataclysmic proportions. Two thirds of the city were destroyed by the flames that blazed for five days. The new Lisbon Opera House, completed just six months before, burned to the ground. The Royal Ribeira Palace, which once stood today's main square, Praça do Comércio, was destroyed, taking with it royal archives, historical records and priceless paintings by Titian, Rubens and Correggio.
The burning city had become a deathtrap. People fled in their thousands down to the river Tagus, where they beheld the extraordinary sight of the river having receded, revealing the river bottom, littered with old shipwrecks. Some ventured out onto it in search of lost treasure.
They had no idea how to interpret what they saw. Their questions were soon tragically answered, as Lisbon suffered a third devastating hammer blow. The earthquake had spawned a deadly tsunami which was soon barrelling towards Lisbon at a speed of 360 mph. At 10.10am, the waters returned, bringing with them a wave nearly 40 feet high, rising up like a mountain above those who had sought sanctuary in the royal square beside the river. Even those on horseback barely escaped it at full gallop. The waters receded twice more as two more gigantic waves crashed in. The vast majority of horrified onlookers were swept away and drowned.
And yet, the fires continued to burn. They asphyxiated people up to 100 ft away from the blaze.
The Royal Family was unharmed, but King Joseph I (see above) suffered from chronic claustrophobic from that day on until the end of his life and the royal court was accommodated in a huge complex of tents and pavilions in the hills of Ajuda above Lisbon.
(Image Copyright © All Rights Reserved. Simon Cousins 2021)
It was left to Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo, 1st Marquis of Pombal (above) to take charge of relief efforts.
He sent firefighters to extinguish the flames and ordinary citizens were ordered to remove thousands of corpses before disease could spread. Against the wishes of the Church, corpses were loaded onto barges and buried at sea beyond the mouth of the River Tagus.
To prevent disorder in the city, the Portuguese Army was deployed and gallows constructed at high points in the city to deter looters. More than 30 people were publicly executed.
The army prevented the able-bodied from leaving the city, pressing them into relief and reconstruction work.
A month after the razing of Lisbon, Manuel de Maia, chief engineer to the realm, presented his plans for the rebuilding of the city. In less than a year, Lisbon had been cleared of debris. The King commissioned the construction of large open squares and wide, rectilinear avenues and streets.
The Pombaline buildings, which replaced Portugal's sumptuous Manueline architecture, were among the earliest seismically protected constructions in Europe.
The 1755 Lisbon earthquake cost the lives of between 30,000 and 50,000 people. 85% of the city's buildings were destroyed. It cost Portugal the equivalent of almost half of its gross domestic product and sped the decline of what had been described as the world's first global empire. By the end of the 18th century, due to a movement in the bowels of the earth lasting no more than six minutes, Portugal had become a tiny shadow of itself, transforming Europe - and the world - forever.
(Image of the present day Praça do Comércio beside the River Tagus Copyright © All Rights Reserved. Simon Cousins 2021)
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