This competition winning design for the new Pompidou Center in Metz [abround 3 hours east of Paris] was designed by Shigeru Ban, Jean de Gastines, and Philip Gumuchdjian. Scheduled for opening sometime later this year to mark the 30th anniversary of the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, by Renzo Piano, Richard Rogers, Sue Rogers, Edmund Happold and Peter Rice, the new center will ‘house one of the world’s most extraordinary collections of modern and contemporary art’.
Our team- Shigeru Ban, Jean de de Gastines and Philip Gumuchdjian won an international competition in 2003 among other finalists of Foreign Office Architects (FOA), Herzog & de Meuron, Stephane Maupin and Pascal Cribier, NOX and Dominique Perrault.
The 12,000 m2 cultural complex includes 6,000 m2 of exhibition space all contained under the roof. Three rectangular, cantilevered boxes house parts of the Pompidou Centre’s permanent collection in a climate controlled environment. Each of the 87-meter-long and fifteen-meter-wide boxes will be directed toward a view of one of the city’s historic monuments such as the railway station and the cathedral [from SBA].
The center is a pavilion space set within a newly created park, made up of both permanent and temporary art collections. The museum appears to be draped in the woven lattice structure of the roof, which Ban describes as being inspired by a woven bamboo Chinese hat.
Protected by this ‘hat’ are 3 rectangular cantilevering steel tubes, each measuring 100m long and 15m wide, which will contain the galleries for the permanent collection - and be situated so as to align with views of local historic monuments, such as the nearby railway station and a cathedral [Saint-Etienne]. The entire exhibition space will be enclosed in movable glass shutter, allowing the center to opened up to the park / gardens which surround it.
images & rendering, courtesy shigeru ban architects.
