241 Centre Pompidou Metz

The building is to be understood and run like a tool of perception: it shows the works of art, the city, the world, and ourselves.

Its outside skin itself, is a mirror…

The new Centre Pompidou is in keeping with the image of the City of Metz. Its proportions and mirror-façade engage with the monuments defining the urban skyline, as do, among others, the Cathedral, the train station tower, and the water tower.

Housed above the city, its public spaces are horizontal and panoramic, thus standing out from vertically authoritarian spaces that shut out the exterior—the cathedral for instance.

Rearing over the plant life in the park below, its distinctive outline catches the eye of European travellers gazing out from the high-speed train.

The building takes foothold in the city, settling down on its esplanade and inviting visitors to enter.

The building in its surroundings
The new Centre Pompidou is an iconic object belonging to the image of the City of Metz. Standing high, it can be seen beyond the railway lines as it engages with the city’s other monuments. It also belongs to the French landscape; moreover, located alongside the future high-speed train station, it will become an object of European stature. It enjoys a foothold in the city, on the esplanade where other public buildings, a multimedia library for instance, promise to follow. At the same time, its mirror skin blends it in with the Amphitheatre Park.

Museographic concept
The spatially compressed floor levels of an introspective nature feature the works of art in a series of orthogonally-structured, adjustable gallery rooms. Visitors take a linear path in following an exhibition’s theme, engaging with both the art and themselves.

Along the decompressed floor levels, which are panoramic and extraverted—the museum forum, café, bookshop, and the like—visitors are free to wander in a spontaneous and possibly even chaotic way. Art installations crop up informally, occasionally, unpredictably. These floor levels are mainly meeting places.

The gallery rooms are variously divided up: the building’s structure defines but a few concrete walls, with the other partitions being positioned depending on the different collection presentations.
In their expressivity, the decompressed floors are meeting places and venues for informal art installations.

In action
The escalators and elevators enable visitors to arrive immediately at their intended destination, and are generously dimensioned to facilitate crowd-drawing events.

The ceremonial stairways encourage walks through the CPM at a more contemplative pace.

Structure
The vertical loads are shifted from one exhibition floor to the next through the decompressed floor levels.
This produces a non-rectilinear and non-vertical language with a spatially expressive impact.
Herzog & de Meuron 2003