At 149-feet tall, the Pompidou Center was well above the height of other buildings in Paris. One critic called the building “a kind of architectural King Kong.”
At the July, 1971, ceremony announcing the competition results, Pompidou wore a presidential suit and tie, but the other men looked like the Beatles on the cover of “Abbey Road”: the Genoese Piano sported the bushy-beard-and-tweed-and-corduroy uniform of an Oxbridge intellectual; the shaggy Anglo-Italian Rogers, just like George Harrison on that London crosswalk, wore head-to-toe worker’s denim in the manner of a British railwayman.
Price and Littlewood’s name for the Fun Palace evoked London’s historic Crystal Palace, the popular success of the Great Exhibition of 1851, which gathered all the machines and marvels of the British Empire, plus some tall preëxisting elms on its Hyde Park site, under one vast glass-and-iron enclosure, a kit-of-parts structure later unbuilt and rebuilt far south of the Thames, before it burned down in 1936. The Fun Palace was designed to go even faster.
A generation older than those students, Rogers had been a well-connected Florentine refugee from Fascism whose fortuitous ancestry brought him to England in 1938.
Much of Rogers’s subsequent legacy was as part of what came to be known in architecture as the British high-tech movement. His signature achievement of that era was the stainless-steel-clad Lloyd’s of London office tower, developed between 1978 and 1986, with its great sunlit atrium and gleaming outboard elevators.
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