design forum - DesignAddict


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	title of this thread your message First, let me say Mr. Piano seems incapable of building something ugly. I have grown to be an admirer (though not a n intense fan) of his work, since Koen nudged me, and I investigated his work. I admire Piano's flare at finding a concept and then working it through as thoroughly as possible into a building that is then informed by the concept at every level of its form. At the same time, his buildings seem to me never to quite transcend the concept into being irreducible buildings--my ideal of what great architecture ought to achieve. They always remain, IMHO, ultimately, thoroughly worked out concepts. Pompidou Center, which he did with Rogers, is utterly fascinating and a conceptual icon, and yet in the end it raises the inescapable question: yes, but why organize all the infrastructure as exoskeleton? Isn't it better to protect the infrastructure from the elements using the walls and roof than not to? Doesn't reducing the walls to just membranes to protect people kind of diminish the potential utility of walls? And isn't it a hell of a lot more work to paint every nook and cranny of infrastructure than it would be to paint walls? Isn't ease of external maintenance a rational utility, too? What we see in Pompidou Center is an engineering exercise in externalizing technology, rather than what I would call design. I mean, outside of paint, how much design choice did Piano and Rogers really have once they committed to the concept of externalizing the infrastructure (should it be called extrastructure?)? Whether pipes, ducts, and conduit are inside, or outside, they pretty much go where they have to go to maximize function and minimize cost. It is worth noting that the Pompidou Center does not have extraordinarily unique function or environment dictating its externalized infrastructure. It was done to be different. It was done to call attention to the building. Any steel frame box made of any material could do what Pompidou Center does. So: in the end, the only rational justification for the Pompidou Center approach to architecture is that if it works better, is cheaper, lasts longer, is more beautiful, or whatever other measure of utility you might like to apply. If Pompidou Center were any of these things, then we would likely have seen a lot more of this kind of architecture solving problems everywhere...but we haven't. And we haven't frankly, because it was a clever high concept, but a dumb design idea. As a former real estate feasiblity analyst, I would instantly have vetoed this design. Why? Because infrastructure is way more expensive to build and maintain than walls and roof. I'd rather build more walls and roof and less infrastructure. Put bluntly, Piano and Rogers built a building with less space and more infrastructure. It is just dumb. Some times I like to use big words, but dumb is all I can say about this building. associated web images (optional) associated web link (optional) your email your password create a forums account \| you forgot your password?