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 this with a system of colour coding in bright primary colours. One witty critic even coined a name for the new architectural aesthetic, calling it "bowelism". This epithet did not stick. Instead, Centre Pomipou became the precursor of what later came to be known as high-tech architecture. The architects have since been vindicated and both have won Pritzker Prizes, one of the highest honours in architecture. Lord Rogers was also knighted in 1991 and made a life peer in 1996.

With the Centre Pompidou, what the architects foresaw (and perhaps what the critics did not) was that society was changing and architecture had to change with it. "Once it opened, the Parisians took it over. More people visited it than any other cultural centre designed before, not because of the things inside but because it was a fun place. You could look up and down it, try to open it up, make it transparent and make it democratic," adds Lord Rogers. Unlike the more elite museums of Paris like the Louvre (which was formerly a royal palace), the architects had created a social space for the people.