On July 19, 1971, Jean Prouvé presented the winning design of the future Centre Pompidou in Paris to an astonished audience. The project's architects, Renzo Piano, Richard Rogers, and Gianfranco Franchini, were considered "unknowns"; its sponsors, the engineers at Ove Arup & Partners, were simply forgotten; the project's idea of a "Live Centre of Information" was denigrated as a "metallic dam" in the heart of Paris; the jury was presumed to have been dominated by the charismatic Philip Johnson and the man who initiated the competition, President of the Republic Georges Pompidou, to have been forced to bend to the jury's will.
Fifty years after those events, it is time to analyze these false certainties through the first chronological and documentary reconstruction of the genesis of the Centre Pompidou.