April 27, 2005: In 2007, the Centre Pompidou will celebrate its 30th birthday. When it was only 20-something, the center had to be shut down completely for two years for a complete renovation (it reopened in 2000). Now further repairs are going to require partial closure of parts of the building, because work needs to be done on some of its famous colorful exposed pipes (the green ones). The building houses a much-used library, a cinema, cafés, a bookstore, a gift shop and a restaurant in addition to its museum of modern art. Referred to as the “refinery” by detractors, Beaubourg (as it is commonly known in Paris) turned out to be far more popular than anyone had ever expected. In 2004, 5.3 million visitors passed through its doors, around 18,000 per day. The renovations completed in 2000 were said to have been made necessary by the overuse of the building, but when you look at Notre Dame, for example, which has been standing for a thousand years, you wonder why a modern public building can’t survive for 20 years without having to shut down completely for repairs.
The Opéra Bastille offers another scandalous story of architectural failure. Designed by Carlos Ott and inaugurated in 1989, it has had ugly netting hanging on much of its façade for nine years now because some of the 40,000 pieces of stone facing on the façade have a nasty tendency to fall off, endangering passers-by. While the opera’s administration, insurance companies, architects and contractors continue to argue about responsibility and solutions (many blame then-President Francois Mitterrand for pushing the building’s completion for the celebrations of the 200th anniversary of the Revolution), the public has to look at this added eyesore on a building no one liked to begin with. The netting itself is starting to fall apart and will probably have to be changed next year.
The Grand Palais’s exhibition hall has similar problems. This part of the building has been closed since 1993 for repairs to its metallic structure, which could no longer hold the glass panels of the roof in place properly. It won’t reopen until 2007, but at least this building has the excuse of being nearly one hundred years old.
We won’t even mention the recent disaster at Charles de Gaulle airport, which is of another magnitude. What’s the problem here? Do today’s architects build obsolescence into their designs? Is it the fault of the materials used? Negligence on the part of builders? We may never know, but let’s hope that architects and engineers will make more of an effort to ensure that their public buildings will not only not collapse, but also last at least a half-century.

© 2005 Paris Update