Scootin'

In a recent interview with Richard Rogers, he talks about the Centre Pompidou in Paris, which he designed with Renzo Piano. The Centre Pompidou was the result of a competition by the French government in 1970. The Centre was completed in 1977. Rogers talked about the political unrest in Paris in the sixties as a key influence. Protesting students and workers nearly overthrew the government in 1968, "That moment nearly changed history, certainly for Europe," Rogers says. "It looked as though there would be a revolution. In fact, it didn’t happen. But we captured some of it in the building."
The Centre was originally called the Centre Beaubourg but was renamed when Georges Pompidou became president after Charles de Gaulle was forced to resign.
Rogers says that putting all the structure and services on the outside of the building was to maximise the flexibility of the internal space. “The one thing we knew about this age is it's all about change, if there’s one constant, it’s change. So we said that we’d make massive floors, which were the size of two football pitches with no vertical interruptions, structure on the outside, mechanical service on the outside, people's movement on the outside and theoretically you can do anything you want on those floors."
The radical design of the building was initially met with hostility. Rogers concludes: "The whole idea of Pompidou was that it is a place for the meeting of all people. And the success of it was that the French took it over and it became the most visited building in Europe."