Paris (EFE).- The Pompidou Center opens this Wednesday its retrospective dedicated to the British Norman Foster, the first for an architect in the great Parisian temple of contemporary art, with a proposal that not only reviews his footprint in the great capitals of the world, rather, it invites you to take a walk through his creative process.
Divided into eight spaces, the exhibition unfolds over the 2,200 square meters of the top floor of the Pompidou and condenses 60 years of practice: from the first mills that Foster restored when he was just a teenager to his projects for man to live in the Moon and Mars.
The visitor is received by a room dedicated to his sketches, dark and flooded with ideas. It is actually a metaphor from Foster’s own mind, as Frédéric Migayrou, Pompidou’s director of architecture, explained to the press at the opening of the exhibition for the press, on the eve of the general opening.
“We may be a bit lost”, explained the also curator of the retrospective on Foster, but it is the “way of entering his aesthetic space, his dynamics of creation”.
This welcome is followed by open spaces that order Foster’s work chronologically and thematically: from the first buildings to the great skyscrapers, such as the tower at number 30 St Mary Ax, in London; going through airport models; bridges; its urban and transport planning projects, etc.
The most intimate of Norman Foster at the Pompidou
The models and sketches reflect many of the key ideas in Foster’s work, such as the use of open spaces and enveloping structures, the need for architecture in communion with its surroundings, the idea that buildings should be energetically autonomous and take advantage of the natural light or the integration of vegetation in space.
As the British architect himself reminds the visitor through quotes on the walls of the Pompidou, his beginnings in architecture, in the 1960s, coincided with the first signs of a world that was beginning to become aware of the fragility of the planet.
Foster has also given the Pompidou objects and documents that are part of his privacy, such as photographs of his beginnings or an old car belonging to the architect Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris, better known as Le Corbusier, which he bought and restored.
He was also involved in staging the retrospective in Paris.
“In the sixties and seventies the future was always brighter and more optimistic. I ardently believe that the future is even brighter and more optimistic than the past, all the scientific evidence supports it. But I agree that it is largely a mental attitude ”, he reflected at a press conference in Paris, on April 25, still in the midst of the last touches.
The retrospective dedicated to Norman Foster can be visited at the Pompidou between May 10 and August 7 of this year.