Centre Georges Pompidou

When it opened in 1977 in the old Beaubourg quarter of Paris, a lot of people thought someone had left the building inside out. Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers took everything a museum usually hides, the pipes, the ducts, the structural bones, the escalators, and hung it all on the outside, colour-coded like a diagram: blue for air, green for water, yellow for electricity, red for the things that move people.

The point was to leave the inside as clear, open floors, and behind that glass front sits the largest collection of modern and contemporary art in Europe, from Matisse and Picasso through Kandinsky, Duchamp and Pollock to living artists. A glass caterpillar of an escalator climbs the front of the building, and the view from the top looks straight across the rooftops to Sacré-Coeur.

It is named for Georges Pompidou, the French president who backed it and died before it opened. In 2025 the whole building closed for a five-year overhaul, stripped back to be renewed rather than replaced.