He has a musical surname and loves sailing, but his real passion is building, or simply - as he likes to say - “gathering materials and assembling them”. He rose to fame hand in hand with Richard Rogers, when they both won the competition for the Centre Pompidou, back in 1971.

The critical fortune of this building is fundamental to understanding the professional career of its creators. It has been described as “a spaceship catapulted into the heart of Paris”, “a joke on a monumental scale”, or “a crude act of boasting”, but its authors insist on defending it simply as “a joke”, as “the irony of technology”. Undoubtedly, it has already become another of Paris' monumental landmarks, as well as a true obra maestra that appears in all the history and criticism books of contemporary architecture...[+]