> That Paris’s Pompidou Centre is to close for four years from 2023 for yet more maintenance comes as no surprise. Weeds have long sprouted from its ultra-finicky superstructure, while the job of keeping it scraped free of pigeon poo and painted in the prescribed infrastructural colour palette – red for people, blue for air, yellow for electricity and green for water – rivals the Forth Bridge for unrelenting laboriousness.
It sounds like the Centre has maintenance problems nearing the coastline-paradox variety...
> ‘There were two options,’ France’s culture minister Roselyne Bachelot told Le Figaro. ‘One involved renovating the centre while keeping it open, the other was closing it completely. I chose the second because it should be shorter and a little bit less expensive.’
It's interesting that this logic somehow misses or skips the weighty symbolic aspect of shutting down a cultural landmark. Presumably this is most of why the news is newsworthy.
Maybe everybody hates the place, but still. Closing down completely sends a pretty big message in the primal sense in which things are alive or dead, usable or not, up or down, and what you typically aim for at worst is a set of circumstances that strike a balance between those aspects.
It's also going to be a slower option in terms of visitor access, which is kind of funny in that it's a near-reversal of the logical benefit one would rationally want. This makes me wonder if the budget gets any benefit at all from visitor payments...(I've worked with cultural sites that flat out told me: We don't want more guests here, and we definitely don't want more membership-holding guests)
https://www.architectural-review.com/essays/outrage/outrage-...