Centre Georges Pompidou

The Centre Pompidou in the 4th arrondissement is France's national centre for modern and contemporary art and home to the BPI public library. President Georges Pompidou launched the project in 1969; the competition was won by then-unknowns Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers with the provocative idea of putting all the services on the outside. The colour-coded facade pipes - blue for air-conditioning, green for water, yellow for electricity, red for circulation - were a scandal at the 1977 opening and are now considered the defining work of High-Tech architecture. Inside, the Musee national d'art moderne holds over 100,000 works from Matisse to Boltanski; the famous glass escalator tube on the west facade offers a free view over the Paris rooftops to Montmartre. The building closes at the end of 2025 for a five-year asbestos refit.