Designed in Paris by Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers, the Centre Pompidou turns a building inside out: everything normally hidden behind walls and ceilings — the load-bearing steel, pipes, ducts, lifts, escalators — is carried outside, onto the facade.

The logic is simple but radical. Two things restrict a building's interior flexibility: load-bearing columns and service shafts. Piano and Rogers pushed both to the outer shell and so emptied the interior completely; the result is wide gallery floors that are column-free, undivided, and adaptable to any use — ideal flexibility for a cultural centre. The steel-truss structure and its cross-bracing are openly visible outside; the escalator inside its famous glass tube draws a diagonal movement across the facade.

The systems along the exterior are coloured by function: not a neutral grey but coded blue (ventilation), green (water), yellow (electricity), and red (human circulation/lifts). The building thus displays its own workings to the outside like a diagram. With this principle of separating "servant and served spaces," the Centre Pompidou becomes the manifesto of high-tech architecture; it treats a building's infrastructure not as a shame to be hidden but as an architectural element to be expressed.