Centre Pompidou

When Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers designed the Pompidou in the 1960s, they turned the building inside out, choosing to expose its pipes, air ducts and escalators in vibrant colours on the museum’s facade. Beaubourg (as Pompidou is known to locals) displays the first collection of modern and contemporary art in Europe, including several Matisse paintings and Duchamp’s (in)famous Fountain sculpture, which turned the concept of art on its head in 1917. On the piazza of the Centre Pompidou is Atelier Brancusi, the reconstructed studio of Romanian sculptor and painter Constantin Brancusi, whose abstract sculptures and other oeuvres were bequeathed to the French state upon his death in 1957. Brancusi’s fascination with how art relates to space makes the studio an artistic statement in its own right.