Building on social responsibility

WHEN the design for the Centre Pompidou in Paris was first revealed to the public in the early 1970s, architect Lord Richard Rogers, 82, remembers feeling embattled. "Nothing was more attacked than the Pompidou," he recalls.

Composed of glass and steel, the museum, when it was completed in 1977, was shocking for its time. Lord Rogers and his collaborator, the Italian architect Renzo Piano devised a structure with flexible spaces that could be easily reconfigured to accommodate different art exhibitions. To do this, the architects relegated circulation elements like the escalators to the front façade and mechanical services like air-conditioning vents to the sides of the building. In essence, they exposed all the guts of the building and further emphasised th…