Word: beaubourg
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Orly Airport. In its place Paris received, among other things, a giant structure that looked like an oil refinery and was to be the biggest cultureprocessing plant in Europe: the Centre National d'Art Contemporain, otherwise known as the Centre Pompidou or, after its site adjacent to Les Halles, Beaubourg...
...wearing its entrails outside its skin. Its architects, Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers, had festooned its four sides with such a tangle of ducts, pipes, risers and shafts that it became the first steel-and-glass building to exclude almost all natural light from its cavernous interior. Since Beaubourg was meant to be (in the jargon of the day) a culturally transparent, non-elitist, participatory, anti-hierarchical, modular omnisensorium, it had no walls to speak of: walls were for palaces and prisons. Instead it had temporary screens, on which its Matisses and Miros hung transfixed like rabbits in the glare...
...destruction of Les Halles rallied the preservationists. The inadequacies of Beaubourg fed a mood of doubt about "radical" museum techniques. By the early '70s it was clear to the men of the Elysee that razing the Gare d'Orsay would be a major vote-losing blunder. The Gare d'Orsay stayed, Pompidou died, and Valery Giscard d'Estaing, the new President, inherited the problem...
Meanwhile, Orsay found its director at the Beaubourg: Francoise Cachin, a brilliant, Sorbonne-educated art historian whose specialty is Manet. The first issue she had to settle was the scope of the museum. What did 19th century mean? There was no way the Louvre was going to surrender its masterpieces of early 19th century classicism and romanticism. So Orsay's program must begin after the peak of the romantic movement. Cachin, Laclotte and the new museum's staff wanted to start in 1863 -- the emblematic year that saw the first Salon des Refuses, Manet's epochal Le Dejeuner...
...certain extent a reaction against the design of industrial products. The most successful feats of contemporary urban design are not the vacuous boulevards of "the city of tomorrow," like the Albany Mall, but teeming festival markets, like Boston's Faneuil Hall. Such high-tech architecture as the Beaubourg cultural center in Paris may make a nice place to visit, but who wants to live there...