More than “a mere building”: Sanford Kwinter on Pompidou/Beaubourg
Was the Centre Pompidou the last building with which architecture meaningfully influenced our wider culture?
After writing the piece on Steven Holl’s Linked Hybrid in Beijing, I happened to be by chance reading Sanford Kwinter’s Requiem for the City at the End of the Millennium, published by Actar in 2010. (Ed. This was first published at cityofsound.com on 17 April 2011.)
A beautiful little book in every sense, Kwinter writes wonderfully and perceptively about the city, and architecture and urbanism, and particularly its relationship to technology. There’s a lot in this small book, but the very first chapter resonated immediately, creating a chance juxtaposition between Linked Hybrid and Centre Pompidou, aka Beaubourg.
Kwinter places the building’s meaning squarely in the context of the early 1970s, when he had been a student, as well as within the extraordinary work of artist Gordon Matta-Clark: particularly his Conical-Intersect (1975), a dirty great bore-hole through a series of apartments in Beaubourg:
