Paris' New Meccano Machine

"Ugly, frightful and odious" were the words used by Solange d'Herbez de la Tour, president of the French Union of Women Architects, to describe Paris' newest and most spectacular art museum. Descendants of such modern masters as Braque and Rouault refused to permit their works to be installed there. Louise Nevelson, Robert Motherwell, James Rosenquist and some 40 other American artists, collectors and critics boycotted the place to protest against France's release of Palestinian Terrorist Abu Daoud. Other detractors simply charged that the computerized temple of glass and steel was too expensive (about $200 million). And so, amid all the scandale beloved of the Parisian art world, 3,500 notables were invited to gather this week for the opening of the Georges Pompidou National Center for Art and Culture.

France's late President first announced in 1969 that he would give Paris "a landmark of our time." A connoisseur and collector of art, Pompidou was dismayed by Paris' gradual loss of stature as an art capital. He dreamed of a building that would be "both a museum and a center for creation, where the plastic arts would exist alongside music, cinema, books, audio-visual research. Its creativity would obviously be modern and continually changing." The location: Beaubourg, once a bourgeois neighborhood between the Bastille and Les Halles, but for the past century a decaying slum. Specifically, planners chose a five-acre patch of razed ground that was being used as a parking lot, then called for an international architectural competition.

Urban Machine. To the chagrin of some Parisians, the competition was won by two foreigners, Italy's Renzo Piano and Britain's Richard Rogers. In the midst of Beaubourg's crumbling brick and mortar, they proceeded to construct what they called a "living urban machine." They planned a six-story building to be formed literally inside out --structural supports on the outside, along with a formidable array of ducts, gantries, movable mezzanines and color-coded pipes for heating, electricity, air conditioning and fire control. Attached to one external facade is a huge escalator with transparent walls, illustrating Rogers' description of the center as a "really easy to understand Meccano machine." Inside is a series of vast lofts, each the size of two football fields, divided by movable partitions.

The Beaubourg Center, as it is popularly known, contains virtually everything that Pompidou imagined. The museum portion is among the world's largest showplaces for modern art, almost twice the size of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. There will be a 1-million-volume library, one of the few in Paris open to the general public, complete with language laboratories and film and tape-recording resources. A Center of Industrial Creation will offer information on everything from the design of everyday objects to the modern city as an archaeological site. Still incomplete is an Institute of Musical Acoustical Research and Coordination, to be directed by Pierre Boulez. There are rooftop gardens, a film center, child-care facilities and a restaurant. The center is also serving to attract new galleries and shops to the rundown streets near by. "The whole area is being reborn, and it's wonderful to see," says Antiques Dealer Didier Rabes.

There are many more headaches in store for the center's staff of 1,000 and for the government. The operating budget for Beaubourg's first year has had to be cut from a staggering $26.5 million to a staggering $24 million--still more than is granted all together to 30 other national museums in France. That has already curbed some of Beaubourg's plans for acquisition and forced a one-day-a-week closing. The biggest challenge, though, is one stated by Guy Metraux, a UNESCO official who edits the review Cultures: "The trouble with cultural centers is that no matter what you put in them, they all sound alike, and they are boring." If that is the fate of Pompidou's dream, it would be a pity.

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