PARIS — “It was like entering Ali Baba’s cave…”
Boris Hamzeian, an architect and architectural history and theory scholar, was born in Sestri Levante, Italy, to a family of Iranian descent. But the mysterious “cave” in question was in Paris, hidden inside the parking lot next to the Centre Georges Pompidou.
There were 400 tubes, containing the original drawings of the revolutionary project with which Renzo Piano, Richard Rogers and Gianfranco Franchini, then in their early 30s, submitted the winning bid to design and build an icon of 20th-century architecture.
Opening one of the tubes, Hamzeian understands that these are the very design materials that were considered missing, and goes straight to Renzo Piano to give him the news. “Look at the stroke, look at the reflection of the ink under the light,” the architect exclaims excitedly. “These are them, these are the originals. For 40 years we always thought they were lost.”
Piano explains that what had been held up to that point in his Foundation in Genoa, or at Rogers’ in London, were “crumbs, fragments.” The 400 tubes instead tell the story of the adventure of the making of Beaubourg. “I never expected this. I am moved,” Piano said. “With this discovery, the Centre Pompidou finally rediscovers its origins.”
The Beaubourg marks a watershed in the conception of museums: no longer courtly, intimidating buildings, the expression of a dusty, academic culture, but instead a center that aimed to be open to as many people as possible. A kind of cultural factory descended upon the center of the French capital, with its green, yellow, blue and white exterior tubes, plus red to indicate the paths and escalators on the main facade. Some people called it pejoratively at the time the “Notre Dame of tubes.”
“We were bad boys,” Renzo Piano recalled. “Every time I walk past the Beaubourg, I’m not surprised that we did it, because someone, in that climate following the demonstrations and May ’68, had to do it, but the fact that they let us do it…?”
One out of 681
The competition was announced in 1971, the inauguration was held on January 31, 1977 with the intervention of the President of the Republic, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing (Georges Pompidou, who conceived the idea and after whom the center is named, had died in 1974): 5,000 people were expected, 30,000 arrived.
They asked to see those drawings, but were told they were destroyed in a flood.
On July 15, 1971, when the name “Piano & Rogers” was read out by the chairman of the competition jury, Jean Prouvé, as the designated winners from among 681 proposals received from 41 countries around the world, no one had any idea who they were.
State Councillor Robert Bordaz, the first president of the Centre Pompidou, organized an exhibition of the design proposals at the time, but the traces of those materials were lost around 1978. “When Piano and Rogers separated their careers and their respective studios,” Hamzeian recounts, “they asked to see those drawings, but were told they were destroyed in a flood.”
The Renzo Piano Foundation keeps about 150 drawings, but the vast majority are photocopies; as many are kept by Rogers’ studio. But they are a very small part of the material produced for the competition that has now been found in the Beaubourg parking lot in Paris.
Legacy and renovation
Hamzeian recounts that the flood had indeed occurred, but had not affected the originals of the winning project. Those 400 pipes had ended up in a storage center in northern Paris, under the jurisdiction of the Construction and Security Office of the Centre Pompidou.
When that space was vacated, archivist Jean-Philippe Bonilli, head of Centre Pompidou’s Archives pole, had the intuition in 2017 to save the collection from destruction and store it in the Centre’s parking lots while waiting for a researcher to assess its contents. That researcher is indeed Hamzeian, who after graduating in Architecture in Genoa had the opportunity to do an internship at Renzo Piano’s studio in Punta Nave.
The Centre Pompidou is about to embark on a major technical and architectural transformation.
Although he opted out of practicing as an architect, he still harbored a deep interest for architectural history, which eventually brought him to a researcher position in the Department of Architecture at the Centre Pompidou.
The next step is indeed to become head of the Piano + Rogers Architects Heritage Fund as well as consultant to the Centre Pompidou 2025-2030 transformation project. Hamzeian has already produced a monograph — From Pompidou to Beaubourg (1968-1971) — based on a search of sources, to retrieve more than 50,000 pages of documentation in archives between Paris, Genoa and London.
The project to be led will consist in archiving, digitizing and enhancing the rediscovered material, in which Jean-Philippe Bonilli and architect Giorgio Bianchi, a partner of Renzo Piano Building Workshop and consultant for the Centre’s transformation work, will also participate as part of a mission sponsored by Laurent Le Bon and Xavier Rey, director of the Muséee national d’art moderne.
“As the 50th anniversary of its inauguration approaches, the Centre Pompidou is about to embark on a major technical and architectural transformation destined to make the building and the facing square one of the most important construction sites of the decade,” Le Bon writes. “Under these circumstances, now more than ever is the time to rediscover the history of our institution.”
