Engineering Beaubourg’s information spaces

From the outset, the Centre Pompidou was to be a live center of information. This paper situated the challenges posed by that vision in the context of emerging models of technical expertise in architecture.

Society of Architectural Historians Annual Meeting, 2008
Session: Architecture and Engineering: Interdisciplinary Contributions to Architecture, 1946-2006
Session chair: Timothy Anstey, University of Bath

Abstract

The brief for the 1971 design competition for Plateau Beaubourg in Paris described not simply another library or museum but a cultural utopia based on a new configuration of architecture and information technology. At Beaubourg, the traditional cultural memory institution was reconceived as an open, cybernetic system—an ecology of spaces, people, and machines. In response, Piano and Rogers, with the engineering firm of Ove Arup, proposed a highly articulated system of structural, mechanical, and electrical hardware servicing flexible, unprogrammed spaces. This approach—by then paradigmatic—had the dual benefit of addressing the brief’s explicit demands for flexibility and of providing the rhetorical basis for a new institutional identity rooted in a critique of architectural monumentality. Although their famous winning scheme’s plug-in, clip-on aesthetic succeeded in producing what Reyner Banham later described as an intensive architectural image (to the degree that it is today difficult to imagine the project in any other form) it also concealed the possibility that the new building was simply a better-serviced version of an established type.

This paper considers this possibility by examining the development of the architectural programme and, in particular, the role of François Lombard, the young, Berkeley educated architect and engineer whom Pompidou retained to guide the project from inception to completion. To meet the challenges of designing the post-1968 cultural organization—to allow for the negotiation between received institutional structures and emerging, non-hierarchical models based on the unrestricted flow of information and the resulting erosion of disciplinary boundaries—Lombard’s team developed an elaborate method of programming informed by industrial process engineering and a nascent discourse on usability. Like the architectural team, they asserted from the outset the importance of flexibility, but went on to argue that its management was a crucial part of the architectural problem, one that required new graphical techniques and new paradigms of collaboration. This paper argues that Beaubourg is thus indicative of a shift in the domain of technical expertise in architecture from the outward display of physical systems to the hidden logic of programme and information flow—that is, from its hardware to its software.

Competition diagram, 1970, from Piano and Rogers, Du Plateau Beaubourg au Centre Georges Pompidou.

Digital Equipment Corp PDP-10, IRCAM, Centre Pompidou, 1979. From Dufrêne, B., ed. Centre Pompidou: Trente ans d’histoire

Museum programming diagram, 1972 (Courtesy H. Dano-Vanneyre)

Library programming diagram, 1972 (Courtesy H. Dano-Vanneyre)