CIVA invites you to the booklaunch of Live Centre of Information. From Pompidou to Beaubourg (1968-1971) by Boris Hamzeian.
When, on July 19, 1971, Jean Prouvé and Robert Bordaz unveiled the competition-winning design for the Centre Pompidou, press and public reaction was harsh. The project architects, Renzo Piano, Richard Rogers, and Gianfranco Franchini, were considered “unknowns” ; its promoters, the engineers of the firm Ove Arup & Partners, were simply forgotten ; the original idea of a “Live Centre of Information”, with its sequences of flexible platforms suspended over an open-air piazza for the crowd, was misrepresented and reduced to the image of a “metallic dam” dropped in the heart of Paris ; the jury was believed to have been dominated by the charismatic Philip Johnson.
Fifty years after those events, through the recourse to all available documentary sources and dozens of testimonies, it is time to analyze these false certainties and trace the genealogy of this famous and still controversial work.
Presentation and discussion with the author, Boris Hamzeian, postDoc researcher at the Architecture department of the Centre national d'art et de culture Georges Pompidou (PhD EPFL, 2021), featuring an introduction by Professor Beatrice Lampariello, UCLouvain.
Actar Publishers.
