Virtual Machines: Culture, telematics, and the architecture of information at Centre Beaubourg, 1968-1977

This doctoral dissertation examines the way in which the architecture of the library and museum in the late 1960s was conceived as a technology for the organization and dissemination of cultural information. It considers the overall history of the Centre Pompidou in Paris, from its origins in the mid-1960s to its opening in 1977. In particular, it looks at ways in which the verbal, graphic, and built statements of the project’s creators, apologists, and critics engaged the discourses of the post-industrial information society.

In late 1950s the architectural Avant-Garde recognized that the technologies of an emerging information society offered the possibility of a renewed architectural commitment to social transformation. But in the early 1970s — at the precise moment that the information society and its technologies took the form that we know today — architects appear to have suddenly abandoned those earlier utopian discourses, exchanging the possibility of a fertile engagement with the broader ideas, metaphors, and methods of information technology for the relative security of tool-based approaches to architecture’s theoretical and logistical problems. This dissertation examines architecture’s troubled relationship to the information society and its technologies during the decade between 1968 and 1978. It focuses on the history of the project for the Centre Pompidou in Paris, from the original conception of the building as an “information center” in the ideas of Pompidou himself to the reception of Piano and Rogers’ building in the years following its completion.

In particular, I focus on the building’s role in a more general program of social and cultural reorganization in the post-industrial society. I show that architects during that time did not in fact retreat from information technology but rather that the very nature of information technology underwent a radical change in the late 1960s, one that demanded new modes of architectural thinking which rendered obsolete the traditional discursive function of the “machine” underpinning the Avant-Garde projects of the earlier decade. In this way, Beaubourg’s successes and failures suggest architectural modes of engagement with information technology that go beyond recent tool-based design practices.