Pompidou Quotes

“Our external tubular heating system, painted in garish primary colors, looked like a poor man's Pompidou.”
― Zadie Smith, Swing Time

“By symbolizing the end of elite privileges (culture was finally made available to the most), the Pompidou was being offered to the masses as a transparent (read: democratic), manipulable (read: empowering), enjoyable (read: ideology- free) and larger- then- life (read: inoffensive) Troy horse meant to defuse masses’ scepticism towards the government, which just ten years before had been contested in the street of Paris. Sounds good, right?”
― Francesco Proto, Baudrillard for Architects

“By addressing the building as an empty signifier (just as the Bauhaus lamp reveals the electrical wiring inside, so the Pompidou exposes its content and function according to a relationship that Baudrillard deems totally arbitrary), the Pompidou Centre is downgraded from architectural icon to hyper- functionalist failure.”
― Francesco Proto, Baudrillard for Architects

“Discussing the system of objects, Baudrillard focuses on the relationship between connotation (external) and denotation (internal) to the system; yet in addressing the Pompidou Centre, both are collapsed into an oversized commodity whose signifier/ signified (aka form/ function) relationship is unstable.”
― Francesco Proto, Baudrillard for Architects