From Pompidou to Beaubourg (1968–1971) Boris Hamzeian When, on July 19, 1971, Jean Prouvé and Robert Bordaz unveiled the competition-winning design for the Centre Beaubourg in Paris, now known as the Centre national d’art et de culture Georges Pompidou, press and public reaction was harsh. The project architects, Renzo Piano, Richard Rogers, and Gianfranco Franchini, were considered “unknowns”; its promoters, the engineers of the firm Ove Arup & Partners, were simply forgotten; the original idea of a “Live Centre of Information,” with its sequences of flexible platforms suspended over an open-air piazza for the crowd, was misrepresented and reduced to the image of a “metallic dam” dropped in the heart of Paris; the jury, which featured figures of the caliber of Prouvé, Oscar Niemeyer, and Willem Sandberg, was believed to have been dominated by the charismatic Philip Johnson; the man who initiated the competition, President Georges Pompidou of France, was believed to