The George Pompidou Center
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The George Pompidou center can possess the only one that has caused so many debates.
Valued by numerous people, it is strongly assessed by others. Today it is regarded, as the first modern-day construction in Paris and it is part of new district.
It happen to become a center of attraction, where an huge crowd combines frequently and repeatedly tarries on the square, structuring small crowds around a fire eater, a "chansonnier", a musician, creating an animation which is suggestive of medieval times. It is the first plan in the Semah process programmed a name, which was given sardonically when it became the Halles unloading place. This audacious and determined proposal of building a center of recent art was of Georges Pompidou, President of the Republic in 1969.
The principles of the seventies which thought that a museum should be opened to a vast number of the public in order to promote comparison, creativity and research was expressed with this building, which is open on an architectural plane both to the public and to artists, with exhibitions which steadily follow one after the other.
The project by the architects Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers was chosen in the international competition.
The building was started in 1972 and it was inaugurated in 1977. It is 166 m long, 60 m wide and 40 m high, it has immense areas in which the installations are functional and visible from the exterior on 5 floors, the characteristic escalator winds in a glass tube, which enlivens the facade with the movement of the crowd. The system of tubes, each with its own color to show its function makes the building picturesquely animated.
From the panoramic terrace you can enjoy, a magnificent view of the roofs of the whole of Paris.
The Georges Pompidou Center has become the heart of four important activities:
Plastic art, with the Great National Museum of Modern Art in which the collections of the Modern Art Museum (which was in avenue du President Wilson) and those of the National Center of Contemporary Art are united and to which other donations have been added, such as works by Kandinskji. There are also different artistic trends represented there, from fauvism, to cubism, to surrealism. To the abstract, until we come to contemporary art in which different international currents meet;
The public library, as a place for promoting reading: this contains thousands of books, divided between three floors, which already seem too small to contain them; beside them are the videos;
Industrial aesthetics, represented by the industrial Creation Center. This included numerousoriginal exhibitions, which are intended to stimulate the visitor to have a critical vision of his surroundings. Therefore the exhibitions concern Both architecture and urbanities and also consumer goods, comic strips, posters and any other means of visual communication;
Music: for this the "Institut de Recherche et de Coordination Acoustique Musicale" (Institute of Acoustical Musical Research and Coordination) was created. This is a real under ground laboratory directed by Pierre Boulez, in which musical creation is promoted by exceptional means. At the foot of the Centre, in front of the church of Saint-Merri there is the first great-animated modern fountain in Paris, this fountain is also very colorful. It was created by N. de Saint-Phalle and J. Tinguely in 1983 and dedicated to Stravinski: it represents an allegory of the orchestra moving around the conductor.
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