Centre Pompidou: Why Its Structure Is on the Outside

The Centre Pompidou has its structure on the outside because Renzo Piano, Richard Rogers and the engineers of Ove Arup & Partners wanted every floor inside to be one open, column-free plate. By pushing the steel frame, bracing, ducts, pipes and escalators to the facades, they turned the building into a flexible container for art, books and music.

Most buildings hide the things that keep them standing and breathing. Beaubourg, as Parisians still call it, does the opposite. Its white steel skeleton, blue air ducts and red escalator tube are the first things you see from the piazza, and they are there on purpose. Below you will find the 1971 competition, the cast steel brackets that make the system work, the colour code on the east facade, the flexibility idea behind it all, how Paris reacted, and what is happening to the building during its current closure.

The 1971 Competition That Picked Three Unknowns

The French state launched an international competition at the end of 1970 for a new cultural centre on the Plateau Beaubourg, a car park in the 4th arrondissement. President Georges Pompidou wanted one institution that would combine a museum of modern art, a public library, industrial design and contemporary music. According to the Centre Pompidou's own magazine, 681 entries arrived from Argentina to Japan, and the jury was chaired by the engineer and designer Jean Prouvé.

The winners in 1971 were a young team: Renzo Piano, Richard Rogers and Gianfranco Franchini, with the structural engineers of Ove Arup & Partners. The Renzo Piano Building Workshop project record names Peter Rice among the Arup engineers on the job. Piano later recalled that he was 33 and Rogers 37 at the time, and that "we didn't hesitate, we just went for it."

Two decisions set their entry apart. First, the team left roughly half the site empty as a sloping public square. Second, they stacked the whole programme into one long steel box whose floors had nothing standing in the middle. Both ideas came from the same reading of the brief: an institution open to everyone needed space that could change as freely as the crowds using it.

Why Is the Centre Pompidou's Structure on the Outside?

The short answer is flexibility. If you want a 45 metre deep floor with no columns, no shafts and no stair cores interrupting it, every one of those elements has to go somewhere else. Piano and Rogers moved them to the long facades: the structural frame and cross bracing on both sides, the circulation on the west facade facing the piazza, and the building services on the east facade facing Rue du Renard.

The Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners project page lists exactly what was pushed out: "the corridors, ducts, fire stairs, escalators, lifts, columns and bracing which would ordinarily interrupt the floors are exposed on the exterior." What stays inside is a stack of open plateaus. The Fondazione Renzo Piano gives their size as about 166 by 45 metres.

This is the move that made the Centre Pompidou the reference point for what critics later called high-tech architecture. It also reverses the logic of the period's other heavy-concrete civic buildings, which you can compare in this brutalist architecture guide. Where brutalism made mass expressive, Beaubourg made the parts expressive, with each component visible and nameable. For a broader look at how designers treat the building skin as a working layer rather than a decorative one, see our piece on the role of the facade in modern architecture.

What Are the Gerberettes?

The gerberettes are the cast steel brackets you see at every floor level on the facades, rocking on the columns like short seesaws. They are the reason the structure can sit outside the glass line without the floor beams becoming impossibly deep.

Each gerberette pivots on a column. Its inner, shorter arm carries the end of a long floor truss. Its outer, longer arm is held down by a slender vertical tie at the outer edge of the building. The truss load pushing down on the inner arm is balanced by the tie pulling down on the outer arm, so the column gets a mostly vertical load and the truss gets a slightly shorter effective span. The name honours Heinrich Gerber, the 19th century German engineer whose cantilever and suspended beam system was used on bridges.

The numbers come from the Centre Pompidou's article on its metallic exoskeleton: 168 gerberettes, each about 8 metres long and weighing 10 tonnes, cast by Krupp in Germany. They sit on 28 columns 49 metres tall, and together with 84 beams about 45 metres long they form 14 portal frames. The beams and gerberettes together weigh close to 8,000 tonnes. The steel was assembled in about nine months, from October 1974 to mid-1975.

Peter Rice argued for cast steel early on. Mass-produced rolled sections would have done the job, but casting let the engineers shape each bracket around its forces, thick where bending peaks and thin where it fades. The result reads as a hand-made object repeated 168 times. The trusses themselves are triangulated lattice girders, a type covered in our guide to common truss types.

The Colour Code on the East Facade

Once the services were on the outside, the team needed a way to make them legible rather than chaotic. They painted each system a different colour, so you can read what a pipe does from the street. The structure itself is white.

Colour Coding at a Glance

The scheme below follows the descriptions given by the Renzo Piano Building Workshop and the Fondazione Renzo Piano:

Colour	System	Why It Is Exposed
Blue	Air handling and ventilation ducts	Large ducts would eat floor height inside
Green	Water pipes	Risers stay clear of the open plateaus
Yellow	Electrical supply	Cable routes can be traced and replaced
Red	Vertical circulation: lifts and moving people	Cores would otherwise break up the floors
White	Primary structure: columns, gerberettes, bracing	Columns outside leave the 45 m span clear

The colour code also works as a maintenance tool. A technician can trace a system along the facade without opening a ceiling, which is a practical benefit of exposure that gets less attention than the visual one. If you present services this way in your own projects, a clean set of system diagram templates saves a lot of redrawing.

The Flexibility Idea Behind the Plateaus

The Rogers office described the building as "an ever-changing framework, a meccano kit, a climbing frame for the old and the young." That phrase sums up the programme logic. A museum, a library and a research centre all grow and change at different speeds. Instead of designing rooms for each, the architects designed a frame that could hold any room, plus floors big enough to be divided and redivided.

Inside, the Fondazione Renzo Piano notes the use of standard steel angles, friction-bolted at the corners, as part of a demountable interior system. The plateaus were never meant to have a fixed layout. Exhibition walls, library shelving and offices could move without touching the frame, because nothing structural stood on the floor except the floor itself.

That freedom had limits in practice. Large open floors are hard to light, acoustically lively, and difficult to keep warm or cool with all the plant hung on one side. The building went through a major refurbishment between 1996 and 2000 under the original architects. The frame stayed. The rooms inside it kept changing, which is close to what the competition entry promised.

How Paris Reacted

The building opened in 1977 to a mixed and often hostile reception. Piano himself remembered the noise: "Lots of people screamed in the beginning, some said it was a 'culture supermarket', a 'factory', a 'refinery', but there was nothing intimidating about our creature." Placed among the stone facades of the Marais, a steel frame wrapped in coloured pipes looked to many Parisians like an industrial plant dropped into the old city.

The public answered differently. The sloping piazza became a busy public space, filled with street performers and people sitting on the paving. The escalator tube climbing the west facade gave visitors views across the rooftops, and the building's openness turned it into a place people visited for its own sake, not only for the collections.

Architecturally, the reaction was even stronger. Beaubourg proved that structure and services could carry a building's whole identity. At Lloyd's of London, Richard Rogers Partnership again placed stairs, lifts, bathrooms and mechanical services outside the main body of the building, in freestanding towers that the practice, now RSHP, describes as "servant" zones. A generation of architects absorbed the lesson that how a building is put together can be its main visual subject. The shift away from both the plain modernist box and the historic references of the time is discussed in our comparison of modernism vs postmodernism.

What Is Happening to the Centre Pompidou Now?

The Centre Pompidou closed to the public on 22 September 2025 for a renovation planned to run until 2030. According to the Centre Pompidou's official transformation page, a final public event called "Because Beaubourg" took place on 24 and 25 October 2025, with construction work scheduled to begin in early 2026 and reopening targeted for 2030.

The work splits into two parts. The technical part, led by AIA Life Designers, covers complete asbestos removal from the facade, treatment of corrosion on the main structure, renovation and energy optimisation of the building, and accessibility improvements. The cultural part, led by Moreau Kusunoki in collaboration with Frida Escobedo Studio, rethinks the visitor experience and how the collection is displayed.

The corrosion work goes straight back to the exterior structure. Steel exposed to Paris weather for nearly five decades needs more care than a frame wrapped inside a building envelope. The Centre's own article notes that the hollow columns were originally filled with water and glycol, a mix that was replaced in the early 2000s with a protective coating. Exposure was always a maintenance commitment as well as a design statement.

While the building is closed, the institution keeps working elsewhere. Its "Constellation" programme, launched in April 2025, places exhibitions with partners such as Centre Pompidou-Metz and the Grand Palais, and with institutions in Shanghai, Seoul, Málaga and Amsterdam. The public information library (Bpi) moved to the Lumière building in the 12th arrondissement, opening there on 25 August 2025.

The exterior silhouette is set to stay as it is. The steel frame, gerberettes and coloured services are the building's identity, and the renovation brief treats them as something to repair rather than replace. What changes is mostly inside: how the plateaus are divided, how people move through them, and how much energy the building uses.

Explaining a building like this usually needs a clear diagram; our Architecture Diagram Essentials template pack is a useful starting point.

The Bigger Picture

The Centre Pompidou put its structure outside so the inside could stay undecided. Fifty years on, that choice is being tested in the most practical way possible: the frame has to be stripped of asbestos, treated for rust and upgraded for energy, while the open plateaus are planned all over again. A building designed to be rearranged is now being rearranged at full scale, which may be the strongest proof the original idea was right.

Cover photo: mayatomo, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.