Word: beaubourg
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...gradual loss of stature as an art capital. He dreamed of a building that would be "both a museum and a center for creation, where the plastic arts would exist alongside music, cinema, books, audio-visual research. Its creativity would obviously be modern and continually changing." The location: Beaubourg, once a bourgeois neighborhood between the Bastille and Les Halles, but for the past century a decaying slum. Specifically, planners chose a five-acre patch of razed ground that was being used as a parking lot, then called for an international architectural competition...
Urban Machine. To the chagrin of some Parisians, the competition was won by two foreigners, Italy's Renzo Piano and Britain's Richard Rogers. In the midst of Beaubourg's crumbling brick and mortar, they proceeded to construct what they called a "living urban machine." They planned a six-story building to be formed literally inside out -structural supports on the outside, along with a formidable array of ducts, gantries, movable mezzanines and color-coded pipes for heating, electricity, air conditioning and fire control. Attached to one external facade is a huge escalator with transparent walls, illustrating...
...Beaubourg Center, as it is popularly known, contains virtually everything that Pompidou imagined. The museum portion is among the world's largest showplaces for modern art, almost twice the size of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. There will be a 1-million-volume library, one of the few in Paris open to the general public, complete with language laboratories and film and tape-recording resources. A Center of Industrial Creation will offer information on everything from the design of everyday objects to the modern city as an archaeological site. Still incomplete is an Institute of Musical...
...year 100,000 Frenchmen petitioned in vain to save Les Halles, the old central food market that Emile Zola described as "the belly of Paris." The market has now been moved to more functional quarters in the suburbs, near Orly airport, and a giant commercial center called the Plateau Beaubourg will rise in place of the old vegetable stands. Last month there were demonstrations against plans for an expressway along the Left Bank. "Today for the first time within memory," says Etienne Mallet, urban-affairs critic for the daily Le Monde, "people are going into the streets to protest against...