When the Pompidou Centre was built in the 1970s, its detractors called it "the factory", "the refinery" or "Our Lady of the Tubes". To supporters, the world's first inside-out building was a giant cruise liner in the heart of Paris, "a cultural vessel designed to cross oceans, brave tempests and take travellers of our time to new shores", an early director said.
The Italian and British architects Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers were only 32 and 36 years-old when they won the competition to design the Pompidou Centre - better known as Beaubourg - in 1971. "For Rogers and me, it was a magnificent opportunity for disobedience," Piano recalled in an interview marking the Centre's 20th anniversary in 1997. "We worked by instinct, more like bad boys than theoreticians, even if we made up explanations later. Commentators saw in it a social, utopian vision, the triumph of technology. But isn't it more a parody of technology?"
This month, the Pompidou Centre reopened after a 27-month closure and £69.15 million in renovations. The exterior has lost its patina of grime and rust. At night, re-designed lighting leaves the less attractive giant tubes on the rue du Renard in the dark, so they blend in better with the surrounding neighbourhood. On the more striking piazza side, a recent acquisition, Jean-Pierre Raynaud's 16-metre-high gold flower pot on a white marble pedestal, stands like a pagan offering. The steel and glass facade traversed by a red caterpillar-like escalator gleams brightly.
Staff offices which ate up close to half of the centre's interior have been moved to nearby buildings, increasing exhibition space in France's National Museum of Modern Art by 4,500 square metres, and the number of works that can be shown at one time from 800 to 1,400. This makes Beaubourg the world's largest modern art museum - bigger than the Museum of Modern Art in New York, curators boast. Yet the Pompidou Centre can show only a tiny fraction of its 40,000-piece collection at one time.
As Beaubourg re-opened, many paid homage to the Irish engineer Peter Rice, who died in 1993. Rice, who also worked on the Sydney Opera House, provided Piano and Rogers with the daring and know-how to gut the inside of Beaubourg, placing its beams and trusses as well as ventilation, heating, air-conditioning, wiring and plumbing on the outside of the building.
Rogers, now Lord Rogers, went on to design the headquarters of Lloyds in London and the Millennium Dome at Greenwich. He praised the renovations overseen by Piano and the French architect Jean-Francois Bodin, but criticised the decision to charge £3.60 for admission to the museum and up to £6 for exhibitions. Beaubourg, he says, is no longer a people's building. "Our original concept was for the building to be as free of access as possible."
The Pompidou Centre's designers attained their goal of creating a "popular" gathering place. The sloped piazza on its west side was often crowded with street performers, young people, pick-pockets and drug dealers. And although the Centre had expected 5,000 visitors a day, it attracted 25,000. Critics claimed its shut-down after only 20 years proved the architecture was inappropriate. Nonsense, said Piano. Any building would show signs of wear after receiving nearly 150 million people.
In the tradition of Andre Malraux's Maisons de la Culture, the Pompidou Centre was meant to be democratic and "pluridisciplinary" - including a public library, theatre, cinema, and music institute founded by the composer Pierre Boulez. It initiated the series of Parisian Grands Travaux which include the Cite de la Musique at La Villette, the 19th-century Orsay Museum, I.M. Pei's pyramid entrance to the Louvre, the giant arch at La Defense and the Francois Mitterrand Tres Grande Bibliotheque.
From the beginning, Beaubourg sat uncomfortably with French politicians. Named after a Gaullist president whose first lady, Claude Pompidou, had adventurous taste in modern art, the Centre was too revolutionary to please conservative Frenchmen. The Left came to power four years after it opened, but despite Beaubourg's popular vocation, the name "Georges Pompidou" and the giant portrait of the late president by Vasarely in the foyer braked the socialists' enthusiasm.
Today, more than ever, the state is in retreat at Beaubourg. The Vasarely mobile has been moved from its central position over the escalators to above the wall over the entrance - where you see it only if you look back. President Jacques Chirac was supposed to inaugurate the renovated Centre on January 11th, but was prevented from doing so when the staff went on strike. In true French tradition, Beaubourg has been shut down - sometimes for weeks - at least nine times by industrial action. In 1978, Salvador Dali got his exhibition off to a great start by arriving in a grass-covered Rolls Royce. Despite the ensuing strike, the show drew 840,662 visitors.
Today, staff oppose the growing role of corporate patronage in running the Pompidou Centre. In the arts as elsewhere, many French people see state involvement as a sort of security blanket, a guarantee of
favourable working conditions. And they object to the use of a museum - ostensibly the property of "the people" for advertising by big companies. IBM, the Printemps department stores, Daimler Chrysler, Moulinex and Air France are a few of the donors sponsoring exhibitions at Beaubourg this year.
The designer Yves Saint Laurent and his companion and business partner of many years Pierre Berge contributed £1.2 million for the renovation of the fifth floor, which houses Beaubourg's more classical 20th-century art - Matisse, Picasso, Braque, Rouault, Dali . . . On January 19th, to mark the end of the summer 2000 Haute Couture collections, Saint Laurent and Berge threw a private cocktail party at Beaubourg. It was exactly the sort of thing that the staff went on strike over: totally undemocratic and to the glory of the fashion business.
Chauffeurs waited in limousines on the cobble-stone piazza. Two friends and I had to show our invitations at least six times before we reached the sanctum of the red caterpillar. As we rose above the fourth floor, there was that old thrill of seeing the Eiffel Tower rise over the city. By the time we reached the party in the new Cafe Costes on the 6th and top floor, the panorama of Notre Dame, Les Invalides, the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe and Sacre Coeur was spectacular - certainly the best in Paris. No wonder so many people are grumbling about having to pay for it.
All of gay Paris seemed to be at the rooftop cocktail party, at least two men for every woman. Like the Great Gatsby, Yves Saint Laurent does not attend his own parties. He is very shy; his companion Pierre Berge says he "was born with a nervous breakdown". Nor was France's most famous designer generous with food. Men in pin-striped suits and women in backless dresses chain-smoked and quaffed champagne.
We left the cocktail party for the fourth floor, which holds the museum's contemporary art. One of the questions raised during the Beaubourg renovations was whether early 20th-century painters can still be classified as modern. The contemporary collection makes you wonder whether it can be classified as art. Do Annette Messager's glass cases full of dead sparrows, or Jana Sterbak's "Vanitas, flesh dress for anorexic albinos, raw beef on model" really belong to the same discipline as Picasso?
Reading the glossy magazine handed out at the cocktail party, I found that the fashion czars agreed with me. "If I only sponsor the great masters of the 20th century, it's because they correspond better to what Yves Saint Laurent and I like," Pierre Berge wrote. The public, too, prefer modern classics. The three most successful exhibitions in Beaubourg's 23-year history were Dali, Matisse and Bonnard.