A Malraux idea, a 1971 competition and a structure that wears its services outside.

The Centre Pompidou is formally the Centre national d’art et de culture Georges-Pompidou, and Parisians call it Beaubourg after the district in the 4th arrondissement where it stands. English Wikipedia traces the idea of a single complex bringing together different forms of art and literature partly to André Malraux, France’s minister of cultural affairs, and his push to spread culture beyond the old institutions. When the food markets of Les Halles were moved in the 1960s, planners looked to the nearby Plateau Beaubourg. In 1969 the new president, Georges Pompidou, adopted the project and made the site home to both a new public library and a centre for contemporary art.

An international competition followed. English Wikipedia says the design by Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers was chosen from 681 entries by a jury that included Oscar Niemeyer, Jean Prouvé and Philip Johnson, and that the selection was announced at a press conference in 1971. The team also included Su Rogers and Gianfranco Franchini, and the engineer Peter Rice was responsible among other things for the cast-steel brackets known as gerberettes. The building was put up by the contractor GTM.

The architecture made the services into the façade. English Wikipedia describes the structure, mechanical systems and circulation as exposed on the outside, and says the functional elements were originally colour-coded: green for plumbing, blue for climate control, yellow for electrical wiring and red for circulation and safety devices. Piano is quoted there describing the aim as “not a building but a town where you find everything – lunch, great art, a library, great music”. A long escalator in a glass tube, nicknamed the “Chenille” or caterpillar, climbs the face of the building towards the piazza.

President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing officially opened the centre on 31 January 1977. It houses the Bibliothèque publique d’information, a reference library open to all, the Musée national d’art moderne, and IRCAM, the institute for music and acoustic research. English Wikipedia says the centre closed for a renovation that ran from October 1996 to January 2000 and reopened on 1 January 2000.

A 1974 consultation, five department colours and five lines drawn in a café.

The identity was planned before the building opened. The Centre Pompidou’s own magazine, in an article by Séverine Pierron dated 10 November 2020, says that in 1974, with the site still under construction, a consultation was launched to define the centre’s “brand image”. It brought together about fifteen participants, among them Michel Olyff, Roman Cieślewicz, F. H. K. Henrion, Adrian Frutiger, Massimo Vignelli and Jean Widmer, working with the architects. The brief asked for “unity in diversity” and “a machine for communication”, and the jury was chaired by Willem Sandberg, former director of Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum, with department heads including Pierre Boulez of IRCAM.

Widmer, his partner Ernst Hiestand and their agency, Visual Design Association, presented their proposal as a folded leporello almost twenty metres long. The magazine says it gave each department a colour: red for the visual arts, blue for the Centre de Création Industrielle, green for the library, violet for IRCAM and yellow for shared spaces, spaced at equal intervals around the colour wheel. The logo, the article says, was sketched in 1977 in a few pencil strokes on a paper tablecloth at a café facing the unfinished building: black bands crossed by zigzags, taken from the Chenille escalator, with no outlines. Widmer is quoted: “It’s the logo I drew the fastest in my entire career. I already had it in my head.”

The mark has changed once. The magazine says decision-makers in 1977 insisted the bands match the number of levels in the building, so six were used, and that in October 2019 the centre returned to Widmer’s original proposal of five lines. It also says that during the late-1990s renovation the president, Jean-Jacques Aillagon, and Renzo Piano asked the Swiss designer Ruedi Baur for new proposals; after protests from staff, the press and designers of the Alliance Graphique Internationale, the culture minister Catherine Trautmann had the logo protected.

Widmer’s death was announced by the Centre Pompidou in early 2026. laRegione, carrying an ats/afp report on 3 February 2026, said the Franco-Swiss designer had settled in Paris in the mid-1950s, designed the signage of the French motorways and the identities of the Musée d’Orsay and the Institut du Monde Arabe, and described the 1977 logo as five black lines on white crossed by a diagonal standing for the floors and the escalator.

Coloured pipes, an escalator on the façade and five black lines.

An art museum’s identity often starts with its building. The façade, the roofline or a single unusual window becomes the shape people remember, and posters, tote bags and membership cards borrow from it long before any logo is drawn. Names do similar work. A long official title is shortened in everyday speech to a surname, a place or a set of initials, and many museums eventually adopt that short form as the word mark, sometimes reduced further to a single letter or monogram that can sit on a banner, a ticket or a phone screen. A collection that spans centuries asks for a mark that stays quiet next to the art, so house identities tend to rely on a restrained typeface, a narrow palette and plenty of empty space.

Exhibitions pull in the other direction. Each major show usually gets its own title treatment, colours and imagery drawn from the works on display, and the house mark steps back to a corner of the poster or the catalogue spine. Inside the building, wayfinding carries the identity in its plainest form: floor numbers, gallery names and directions set in the house typeface on walls, lifts and printed maps. The shop and the ticket desk extend it to bags, labels, admission tickets and membership material, where colour can code a ticket type or a membership level. Online, a digital collection site turns the identity into an interface, with image grids, object records and search filters that have to work for researchers and casual visitors alike.

Closed in Paris until 2030, open elsewhere under the same name.

The Paris building is now shut. ArchDaily reported on 22 September 2025 that the Centre Pompidou was closing for a transformation lasting five years, with a planned reopening in 2030. After an international competition the renovation went to Moreau Kusunoki in association with Frida Escobedo Studio, with AIA Life Designers for the technical work, in a project begun in 2020 with the support of the Ministry of Culture. The magazine listed façade replacement, new circulation through the Piazza, the Forum and the Agora, a reworked library, a “New Generation” space for younger visitors and a new rooftop terrace. English Wikipedia says preparatory closures began on 2 March 2025 and that the library moved to its Lumière building on 25 August 2025.

The name has travelled while Paris is closed. ArchDaily said the centre’s programme would continue at partner venues in France and abroad through a scheme called Constellation, and that a conservation and creation facility, the Centre Pompidou Francilien – Fabrique de l’Art, would open in Massy in 2026. English Wikipedia lists the branches: Centre Pompidou-Metz, opened in 2010 in a building by Shigeru Ban whose 77-metre spire nods to 1977; a site in Málaga in a glass cube known as El Cubo from 2015; KANAL – Centre Pompidou in a former Citroën garage in Brussels, announced in 2018; the Centre Pompidou x West Bund Museum in Shanghai from 2019; and the Centre Pompidou Hanwha in Seoul, announced in April 2026 to open on 4 June 2026. A site in Foz do Iguaçu, Brazil, is scheduled for 2027.

Across all of these the same few devices recur: Widmer’s black lines, the colours assigned to departments, and the exposed red, blue, green and yellow of the building itself.

For a design guide, the Centre Pompidou shows an institution whose identity is read straight off its building: services painted by function, an escalator turned into five black lines, and a department colour code fixed before the doors opened in 1977. Compare the Renzo Piano Building Workshop and Musée d’Orsay guides. For this guide we use department red, chenille black, duct blue, pipe green and wiring yellow with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Centre Pompidou’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.