French studio duo Moreau Kusunoki have announced their plans for the prolonged renovation of the Centre Pompidou in Paris a year after the museum announced its closure for five years in order to realize the project, whose costs are estimated at around €262 million ($280.5 million USD). The plan will come together with the help of Frida Escobedo, the project's associate designer.

As many of you who have been closely monitoring Archinect Jobs may have noticed, Frida Escobedo recently posted a job listing for a French-speaking Senior Architect. This position, likely affiliated with the Centre Pompidou renovation project, seeks an experienced professional to join her growing New York City studio. The role involves working on complex cultural projects in Europe, mirroring the responsibilities and challenges of the Pompidou overhaul. 

According to the museum, the renovation is being designed to instigate a new kind of public experience while exposing its innermost recesses to the vibrancy of city life as the heart of Paris’ high culture. Work will deliver a new Forum entry sequence plus an open rooftop space and expanded multi-use cinematic area below the plaza totaling 70,000 square feet and dubbed the Agora. 

Beyond that, the existing adjacent Brancusi Studio will be  "reintegrated" into the program. A reimagined Public Information Library is included at Level 2 as a center for engagement and learning, augmented by the children-oriented New Generation Hub that greets the Forum on Level 1 while offering flexible space geared around a double-height staircase linking both new areas together.

"Our proposal is guided by our underlying approach to architecture – the concept of ‘in-between’, or mâ in Japanese – in which all-capable, interstitial spaces make way for life and meaning to evolve and naturally appear in between defined spaces," Moreau and Kusunoki, the lead architects for the project, say. "Since its inception, the Centre Pompidou has strived to be an experimental space, constantly reinventing itself in order to remain relevant and inspire new ideas. We saw this renovation project as an opportunity to enhance all of these aspects and, through a respectful, adaptive repair, to create a museum that reinforces an openness and continuity with the city."

The High-Tech Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano-designed crowning jewel of Parisian post-modernism progressively developed the need for major repairs following the completion of its last slate of renovation work in December 1999. Escobedo and her French partners will have a rather massive undertaking at hand: the building is slightly over 807,000 square feet and includes a sub-grade storage basement and six different gallery levels. Piano is said to be retained as a special consultant on the project and will advise their efforts which entails the refurbishment of its exterior facade piping and removal of ingrained lingering asbestos. 

"This project requires reflection on the best approach and method to adopt during technical and architectural work on a building that is a watershed in an architectural trend," the Centre Pompidou states. "To achieve this, AIA Life Designers are leveraging all the resources at their disposal, namely their extensive technical expertise and conservation and heritage architecture tools."

A recent labor dispute had hastened a three-month closure of the facility. Beforehand, the museum announced it would not reopen in time for its 50th anniversary in 2027. Instead, the project will now be completed in 2030. Escobedo will have then finished the final stages of her heavily publicized expansion of the Modern and Contemporary Art Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City (where she has been operating in situ). The French government is funding most of the project while facing cries to speed the process up from local critics and curators.  

Materials will be re-used on-site, resulting in a 60 kg eqCO2/m reduction in carbon. Work is expected to begin in April 2026 after the museum fully closes next December.