That earlier President had, by acceding to an unusually wide-open 1971 design competition featuring more than six hundred entries from forty-nine countries, caused the building to be designed by a small group of men who, by the traditionally geriatric standards of architects, were then achingly young. It was the Pompidou Center, inaugurated on that day by the President of the French Republic, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, and named for his late precursor in that office, Georges Pompidou. It looked like something between an oil refinery and the deck of a container ship. At a hundred and forty-nine feet tall, the building was well above the general height limit of some sixty feet-established during the nineteenth-century reign of Napoleon III, by the Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann-that still gives central Paris its relentlessly charming conformity. At the intersection of the Rue Beaubourg and the Rue du Renard, in Paris, along the roughest edge of the Marais, it took the form of a big new multipurpose public building- médiathèque, cinémathèque, bibliothèque, musée-in tempered glass and cast steel. The future began on Monday, January 31, 1977.
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