Concours Beaouburg 1971 Une mutation de l’architecture Collection Documents

In 1971, an international jury examined 681 entries for the design of a cultural institution that has since gone down in history as the Centre Pompidou. Drawing on previously unpublished documents from the Centre’s public archives, presented alongside pieces from the collections of the Académie d’architecture, Concours Beaubourg 1971 constitutes the first retrospective dedicated to analyzing the impact of this event on architectural discourse.

Positioned between the followers of the Beaux-Arts tradition and the representatives of the avant-garde, the winning project by Piano, Rogers, Franchini, and Ove Arup & Partners dissolved the boundaries between architecture, engineering, and high technology. It championed a vision of “integral design,” inheriting the legacy of French metallic architecture experiments developed since the interwar period.