Paris's 'ageing' Pompidou Centre to close for four years of renovations

The Pompidou Centre, one of Paris's top cultural attractions and home to Europe's biggest modern art collection, will close from 2023 for four years of renovations.

The museum will reopen to mark its 50th anniversary year in 2027.

Designed by star architects Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers, the Pompidou Centre opened in 1977 and is showing visible signs of ageing.

"There were two options," France's Culture Minister Roselyne Bachelot told Le Figaro newspaper on Monday. "One involved renovating the centre while keeping it open, the other was closing it completely.

"I chose the second because it should be shorter and a little bit less expensive."

Like all cultural attractions in Paris, the Pompidou Centre closed between March and June in 2020 during the first wave of the global coronavirus pandemic and has been shuttered again since late October.

The building's radical design pushes almost all its structural and mechanical elements to the exterior, freeing up vast exhibition spaces on the inside.

A maze of blue air-conditioning conduits, green water pipes, yellow electrical casings and red elevators are on display outside.

The bold project in the historic heart of the French capital faced heavy opposition at the time in the 1970s, including lawsuits, but it has become a much-loved landmark.

A total of 3.2 million people visited the museum in 2019 before the onset of the coronavirus health crisis.

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