Architect Notebook .... SERVICES

Centre Georges Pompidou

This approach reached its zenith at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, 1977, and at the headquarters for Lloyd’s of London, 1986, both by Richard Rogers, where the conventional central core of services within a flexible space was reversed so that these elements were shifted to the periphery of the building. Furthermore, they were given clear external expression so that lift cars, escalators, and ventilation ducts were displayed as a dramatic image of so-called ‘hi-tech’ architecture.



Similarly, architects of so-called post-modern persuasion have also felt little compulsion to allow innovative structure or services to inform an architectural expression whose origins were quite remote
from such considerations. The honest expression of elements which make up a building exercised architects throughout the twentieth century so that a question of morality has constantly underpinned the modernists’ creed, a position joyously abandoned by their post-modern brethren.

Centre Georges Pompidou