The secret history of the colors of the Pompidou Center (which almost turned mustard yellow)

Google News Subscribe to read

Story Blue, green, red, yellow, white… This summer, the Parisian museum is orchestrating a modern history of color in Monaco through the masterpieces of its collections. An opportunity to ask why the pipes of Beaubourg are multicolored? The story of a little-known battle that involved NASA, Georges Pompidou, the entire avant-garde of optical art, and Georges Braque.

To go further

"On the Rue du Renard side, the new culture factory, which has been compared to an oil refinery, spits out its multicolored guts: ventilation pipes, heating pipes, electrical circuits. The technology is on full display." On January 24, 1977, "Le Nouvel Observateur" devotes ten pages to the inauguration of the Centre Pompidou seven days later. The magazine dares to put the rear facade of the monument on the front page, the most pop, the most iconic, the one where the technical equipment is relegated, the one that earned it the nickname "Notre-Dame-des-Tuyaux."

Nearly fifty years later, the polychromy of the pipes and networks of the Meccano Beaubourg still stands out above the grayness of the Parisian rooftops. Each color has its function: red for the circulation of people, works of art, and goods (escalators, elevators, freight elevators), light blue for air flow (air conditioning), green for water, yellow for the electrical network. The metal structure, for its part, is…