The Financial Times' Edwin Heathcote is not a fan of Shigeru Ban's design for the recently completed Pompidou Metz.
The Financial Times' Edwin Heathcote is not a fan of Shigeru Ban's design for the recently completed Pompidou Metz.
The Pompidou’s first provincial outpost is housed in an eccentric and frankly ugly building on the wrong side of the tracks in a city that has itself suffered from its position on the mobile border between France and Germany.
3 Comments
I was surprised when i saw head lead in. To be honest the first photos have made me think it might be quite nice. Particularly the way the boxes/rectangles frame specific views of the city.
Now is a building that simply frames it's surroundings instead of creating a new spatial experience a mess? Not sure, guess i won't know unless i can visit.
To add my two cents to that comment, I'm surprised most critics haven't perceived the natural filiation between the original Pompidou in Paris and this one. To be more prcesie, this project is, to me, an interpretation or an hommage of a very old utopian project of Piano (that I cant find any picture of) back in the 60's; it was a small tent that you would bring from village to village to generate debates and discussions amongst the citizens, about public spaces. A public space generator. This one is a much larger/expensive/official version of the project. It makes it even more interesting to me.
if someone didn't call it ugly, it wouldn't truly be honoring pompidou legacy.
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