Fifty Years of Competition for the Beaubourg Plateau

Abstract

Exactly fifty years ago, in 1969, an international competition was held for the design of a cultural center in Paris on the Beaubourg Plateau. The winning project was very ambiguously accepted by the professional community, and the construction built a few years later produced the effect of emotional shock. Appreciated by contemporaries as an epithetic experiment by young architects R. Rogers and R. Piano, the Pompidou Center essentially became a manifesto of high-tech architecture, laying the foundation for a significant trend in architecture of thelast third of the 20th century. The article traces the history of the formation of the concepts underlying this project, shows the continuity of the traditions of modernism in the mastering the technology phenomenon in architecture at a new stage of its development. The distance of time allows to impartially assess the significance architectural process of this extraordinary structure for the world, which has become over time one of the most attractiv place in the capital of France.