Preface

Dal Co, Francesco

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Preface

Francesco Dal Co

Centre Pompidou: Renzo Piano, Richard Rogers, and the Making of a Modern Monument

~In explaining how the Centre Georges Pompidou came to be designed and built, and ultimately considering how it was received and how a similar building might be seen today, I found myself in the position of having to interlace a number of different narratives, in some cases seemingly divergent. Considering the historical junctures which framed their...

Author

Francesco Dal Co

PublisherYale University Press

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-21764

Preface

In explaining how the Centre Georges Pompidou came to be designed and built, and ultimately considering how it was received and how a similar building might be seen today, I found myself in the position of having to interlace a number of different narratives, in some cases seemingly divergent. Considering the historical junctures which framed their work, I devoted particular attention to the architects’ and engineers’ design processes and construction choices. In order to understand what the Centre Pompidou is and what it represents, I found it necessary to examine these processes and analyze these choices along with the more complex historical circumstances behind the construction of the building.

In thinking about the many histories I was obliged to weave together, I had a sense that the numerous and varied topics covered in the book might make for fragmentary reading and that it was thus preferable to give my writing a stringent rhythm. For this reason I have, for instance, avoided including footnotes. I have instead incorporated references to the most significant literature in the text and have taken into account the personalities of the authors and topics on which they touched, allowing them to become integral parts of the story. The bibliographical note presents an overview of these sources and tries to clarify the debt I owe the authors quoted.

In the essay “How Should One Read a Book?” published in the October 1926 issue of The Yale Review, Virginia Woolf, who evidently thought that words carried a slightly different nature than that attributed to them by Nietzsche (“each word is a prejudice” we can read in his Menschliches, Allzumenschliches), argued that “words are more impalpable than bricks.” She then added, though speaking of short stories and novels, that a book is always “an attempt to make something as formed and controlled as a building.” Though I may slightly bend the meaning of this statement, I think that books written by those treating the history of architecture in particular should strive toward a similar goal. As for me, I have tried to follow this advice myself by giving the book the shape of an essay. The essay format allows readers and the author to enter into a “broken conversation”; but, as one of the most brilliant minds of the twentieth century, Walter Benjamin, wrote about the Italian style of argumentation, “the ‘moral’ of an interrupted conversation follows after you like a lost puppy, and just when you have gone all the way there, you find yourself empty-handed” (I hope that this quotation, conveying the considerable intelligence offered in a few lines of Über die Art der Italiener, zu diskutieren, will not be seen as a flirtation nor be used against me).

The aim of the book is not only to provide information about the construction of a building that has made its mark in recent history (and not just that of contemporary architecture). Like any book this one has the ambition to encourage those who read it to deepen their studies or to increase their curiosity, and in this way to acquire knowledge allowing them to challenge the arguments that are supported and criticized here, whether in depth or circumstantially. I think that this is the way one should interpret Virginia Woolf’s exhortation to the reader, again from “How Should One Read a Book? ”: “Do not dictate to your author; try to become him. Be his fellow-worker and accomplice.” The word that I find most important here is “fellow-worker.” This compound word alludes to the fact that every book reaches its goal as soon as it encourages the reader to “work together” on the topic that the book has brought to his or her attention, as the word “accomplice” suggests with a certain wanted emphasis.

For those who desire to take this advice and deepen their knowledge of the history of the Centre Georges Pompidou—or the histories that Centre Pompidou inspired—there is no lack of tools. The literature dedicated to this work, familiar to many as simply “Beaubourg,” is vast, and heterogeneous at that. In the bibliographical note at the end of this book, I have tried to tell readers how it served me, and rather than merely presenting a list of titles, I have offered explanation of how and to what extent I have acted as a “fellow-worker” toward their authors.

The variety and breadth of literature that is related to the Centre Georges Pompidou, either directly or indirectly, confirms that it is often more complicated for a historian to deal with a topic close at hand than from a distance. The passing of time helps to select sources, and it narrows down the number of documents and puts them into perspective, which is not to say that it puts them in the “right” perspective. Putting the facts in the “right” perspective is not time’s concern—that is up to the historian. But it is no longer acceptable to think that the historian’s job is to represent the past “wie es eigentlich gewesen” (as it actually happened), as the nineteenth-century German historian Leopold von Ranke thought. Indeed, formulating this precept “father” Ranke provided “a powerful narcotic to the nineteenth century,” as Benjamin subsequently asserted, some effects of which still linger today. Therefore the perspective in which the historian places the historical facts can never be the “right” one. To grapple with historical events implies the need to choose and decide, with the understanding that every choice and each decision can never be objective. What’s more, the words “decision” and “choice” imply etymologically the necessity to abbreviate, as happens often in the genre of essay writing on which I have relied (decidere in Latin is formed from de, implying a removal, and caedere, which means to cut).

When one treats a contemporary topic, however, the sources and documents accumulate and multiply in an erratic fashion, which creates additional difficulties for interpreting them and for making choices and decisions wisely. Things become still more complicated when the historian writes about events with which he has coexisted. To be a contemporary of that which you treat is not necessarily an advantage. Proximity in time, and the closer the more problematic, can result in a distorted observation of events, similar to that suffered with conditions of vision such as diplopia, or double vision. One effect of this condition is a difficulty in separating the abundance of readily available information because of the different ways in which this same information is represented. This difficulty is inherent in the conditions of closeness and proximity in which this book took shape.

In addition, to be a contemporary or even a participant in the events that you want to interpret makes it complicated to study them without becoming victim to that which often accompanies factual evidence, the “invented tradition.” I employ here, with a small stretch, terminology from The Invention of Tradition by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (1983). “Invented traditions” also include those “emerging in a less easily traceable manner within a brief and datable period . . . and establishing themselves with great rapidity,” wrote Hobsbawm, citing as a rather prosaic example to communicate to his readers the wide spectrum of the meanings of this concept “the appearance and development of the practices associated with the Cup Final in British Association Football.”

In writing about the Centre Georges Pompidou and studying its history, I think it necessary and not just opportune to grapple with the invention of a tradition. This tradition, nourished by legends of various origins, has contributed not only to the building’s extraordinary success but also to an obfuscation of its real nature. The same tradition has transformed Centre Pompidou into a gathering place for rituals accompanying the formation of beliefs, as well as the styles and tastes of contemporary life, the continuous development of what Elias Canetti, in his extraordinary book Crowds and Power (1960), had called the “drive of the masses.” If I may say so, liberating Beaubourg from this invented tradition was one of my goals in writing this book.

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