Alasdair Ferguson

CASE STUDY:The Pompidou Centre

BirminghamSchoolofArchitecture

STRUCTUREThe Pompidou centre contains the museum of modern art, a library, exhibition spaces an art centre, an audio-visual research centre and several restaurants. The building is separated into two sections: the infrastructure containing the services, ducts and other technical amenities, which is 3 floors underground. The superstructure is a composed of glass and steel and rises 7 floors each 7m from floor to ceiling.Due to the nature of the building, the floors were required to be completely clear and were 48m x166m. This was solved by dividing the 166m into 13 bays each spanning 48m. Col-umns around the exterior topped with Gerber-ettes 8m long, allowed large truss beams to span the 48m distance. A concrete composite floor is suspended on these trusses and 12.8m beams were used to cross-support the large truss beams.The structure seen on the outer façade is pre-dominantly cross bracing for these large floors with vertical tension bars.

The Georges Pompidou Centre in Paris is a building I have closely aligned my project with. The honesty of the materials and the structural elements is one I admire and aim to replicate in my own way. The Pompidou Centre uses an exoskeleton to create large open, unobstruct-ed spaces internally for gallery spaces. Due to the nature of my building, I want to show the structural elements internally so students learn from the school itself. The façade of the Pompidou Centre is almost undesigned, allow-ing the structure to form the exterior visage of the building. I toyed with the idea of having a similar external skin however I felt that the subtle binary and repeated geometry allows a more expressive façade more in line with what I wanted to create, I feel that the monstrous columns and beams that infer the form is a homage to the external frame of the Pompi-dou Centre but exaggerated for visual effect.

INTRODUCTION

External Superstructure

Underground Infrastructure

Gerberettes

Columns

Truss Beams Truss Bracing

External Staircase

External Cross Braces

ENVIRONMENTALThe building was designed to be wholly elec-tric and has no passive heating or cooling strategy, the building is fully air-conditioned and has boilers and a refrigeration system that feeds the air-conditioning system. The heavy equipment resides predominantly at the base of the building in the 3 service floors below ground. However most of the air-conditioning is contained in the plant room at the top of the building. The heating and cooling comprises of centrifugal refrigeration machinery; which contains a system that recovers heat from the air conditioning exhaust and transfers this heat back to the air-conditioning systems. To aid this refrigeration system are several electric boilers and hot-water storage used in peak electrical times to save on costs. There are several re-sistance heaters to preheat the large concrete floors which act as thermal mass throughout the day when needed.

CONSTRUCTIONThe steel frame is comprised of three basic elements, the columns, the gerberettes and the truss beams. The columns are centrifugally cast-steel tubes 850mm. The gerberettes are solid steel cast members with solid round ties 200mm which are attached to the gerberettes by screw and pinned to the beams which con-sist of a double tube for the top of the beam and double solid round beam for the bottom of the truss with alternating solid and hollow diagonal cross members which are welded to the top and bottom of the truss.

Pre Tensioned Vertical Bracing

Gerberrete

Column

Curtain Wall

Double Tube Top Truss

Cast Steel Nodes

Alternating Solid and Hollow Bracing

Composite Concrete Floor

Deatil of the Gerberette

CRITICAL APPRAISAL

The Pompidou centre has really split the popu-lation of Paris, in its controversial design it has unaffectionately been termed the Pompidolium by residents who liken it to an oil refinery. Crit-ics have also been split with some suggesting it is an engineers dream, with others suggesting it is as close to Cedric Price’s fun palace dream than anything else has come. After spending a lot of time studying Cedric Price and Non-Plan it is easy to see the comparison between the Pompidou and Non-Plan. The large open floorplans and the clever use of engineering to allow this, the sole use of escalators throughout the building, the changing uses of the tempo-rary exhibition spaces do draw similarities to Price and the Non-Planners.

“Ad-hocism, of course, is somewhat in fashion at present, and will always have a big place in the art of design, but its visible presence at Pompi-dou is curiously disturbing. It is conspicuously inappropriate to a design, which otherwise has avoided manifest compromise. The existence of the great model of the final design shows how final that design already was by late 1972; the earlier models show how little has changed conceptually from the first competition design. In a period when far less complex designs have had to expect almost total transforma-tion through ‘reasonable’ compromise, almost nothing has changed on this project. And this, surely, is its ultimate enigma.Here is a response to a commission that called fur adaptability, interpreted by the architects in an extreme form that drove the idea of perfect adaptability almost as far as it can bed driven; therefore there was, presumably, a bigger po-tential for changes of direction and interpre-tation than normal. But the finished building simply looks like the model multiplied. The ar-chitects could claim that they got the design right in the first place. This must be a remark-able claim to make about a facility intended to be changed and adapted over along period of time, and it raises two very worrying questions; one operational, the other symbolic.The operational question is one that is already concerning the architects much as it concerned

Archigram as the design of their Monaco enter-tainment centre progressed: how will the place be managed? What is the point of producing a machine of perfect adaptability if it will not be imaginatively adapted-remembering that, the more nearly perfect the adaptability of the design, the fewer the clues the design will give on how adaptation should be wrought upon it.The question of management will qualify all attempts to judge whether the Centre is func-tionally adequate; a fair number of critics will be sure to pan the gallery spaces as unsympathet-ic to whatever is exhibited there-but how many will ask whether they would be’ more sympa-thetic if someone other than Pontus Hulten was running the Musee d’Art Moderne and using them differently.The symbolic problem is less scrutable. Centre Pompidou is clearly a monument, a very per-manent monument presenting what is already a fixed image to outward view, and few of the routine modifications that might be adapted to its services and other externals is likely to have much effect on that fixed image of transpar-ency and tracery, bright colour and mechanical equipment.”

One of the main issues that I have already picked up on is the utter lack of any passive heating or cooling which after reading a criti-cal appraisal by Reyner Banham I may have found the reason for. Banham displays the little change between Piano’s and Roger’s competi-tion entry and the final building. He suggests that normally with competition entries there is a compromise between the entry and the final design as there are inputs from all angles ad-vocating little changes for a multitude of rea-sons especially when it is a government spon-sored building. He gives several reasons why this may have been the case in this instance but with competition entries due to the tight time restraint it is near impossible to consider every detail of the building and I feel that an environ-mental strategy was never put in place and was crowbarred in at a later stage. This is a small criticism of the building but an important one none-the-less.

Pompidou Concept Model

Pompidou Elevation

CONCLUSION

The Pompidou centre is arguably one of the most iconic yet controversial buildings in Paris. It’s High tech style has divided the citizens and also the critics, its bold exterior honesty has been congratulated and condemned, however whatever you think of the building you cannot argue that it has stayed true from inception to construction despite that this may have affect the environmental impact. It is monstrous in size and in ambition and in my opinion Piano and Rogers have created a work of art maybe more spectacular than any it holds.

REFERENCES

All images have been changed and editted considerably to better inform the reader

Information and Images

Architectural Review - 1977 MAY: THE POMPIDOU CENTRE, THE “POMPODOLIUM”

Information

http://ad009cdnb.archdaily.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/1276224585-conservapedia.jpg

Images

http://web.dcp.ufl.edu/maze/pub/arch_humanity/

http://architectuul.com/architecture/centre-pompidou-1