Original subtitles

How do you construct an apartment building

in the middle of a lake

that looks as though it’s suspended in midair?

There was this moment where the two sides would kiss.

That was a moment I will never forget.

How do you stop a 101-story skyscraper

from swaying in the Windy City,

where gusts reach 80 miles an hour?

It truly is a super tall structure,

and it pushed us in places

that we weren’t used to being pushed.

And how do two upstart architects create

an international icon that changes the world?

When we saw this competition, we said,

let’s make a bit of drama.

Welcome to a world where anything is possible.

The space where innovation and creativity collide.

This isn’t just impressive, it’s revolutionary.

Where the only limit is human imagination.

This wasn’t just ambitious, it was audacious.

No one had ever attempted anything like it.

Unpacking the miracles and mysteries

of construction.

Sometimes buildings can change the world.

And this is one of them.

To ask...

How Did They Build That?

With a third of the country below sea level,

and the rest just typically 36 feet above it,

good building land in the Netherlands is scarce.

Luckily, though, they are rich in gifted humans

capable of architectural miracles.

Architects so clever that while they might not be

able to walk on water,

what they can do is build incredible houses on it.

It’s the late 20th century,

and Amsterdam is booming.

The population has just hit one million people,

and the city needs more homes.

But there’s a problem.

Believe it or not,

almost the entire city of Amsterdam

was literally pulled out of the water.

Those iconic canals and those charming streets

were built from scratch over hundreds of years

with brilliant engineering.

But now, the city’s run out of room.

So what do they do?

They decide to create a suburb

by building six new islands

and 20,000 homes on Lake Ijmee.

The water has always been an important ingredient

of the city of Amsterdam.

We don’t fight against the water,

but we have learned to work with water.

By 2011, the islands and houses are underway.

But it’s lacking a certain something special.

They were really looking at making it possible

to have a new landmark at

that side of the city of Amsterdam.

Not only did they want an icon,

they wanted an apartment block

that fostered incredible community spirit.

Local firm Barcode

and Danish company The Bjarke Ingels Group

team up to nail the brief.

If you see the building from above,

it really looks like

a completely classic square block.

But when you see it from the sides,

you realize that it’s lifted up to the north,

allowing boats and paddle boards and kayaks to sail all the way

into the courtyard.

And the courtyard effectively becomes a marina.

It’s an extraordinary idea

and a million miles from the norm.

If you take kind of the traditional courtyard bloc,

there you have kind of the public outside

and the private inside.

And here we kind of completely turned that thing around.

And that, in combination with the water,

allowed for a super public experience inside out.

Known as Sluishuis, this 442 unit apartment building

will rise from the water.

While its terraces seem to tumble down

to the public marina below.

Building it will mean overcoming some daunting hurdles.

First, they’ll have to anchor the structure to the lake bed.

Then they’ll need to hold back the water

so they can actually build it.

Next, they’ll have to create an extraordinary shape

without the whole building tipping forward.

And finally, release the water

to surround the building without flooding it.

When it’s completed, Amsterdam will have

a new apartment building and a stunning new landmark.

Now we really have to come through

and see if it’s actually possible,

what we imagined.

When work begins in December 2018,

they have to build the foundation

while contending with water.

Lots of water.

First of all, to carry the building,

you need to drive piles deep into the mud and the sand.

For a building like this, you want really good bedrock,

good sand layers to drive your piles in.

And those were unfortunately really deep.

And when he says really deep, he is not kidding.

200 feet deep.

That’s actually deeper than

the foundations of a typical skyscraper.

And the kicker is, this was

for a building that was only 11 stories tall.

To hold up a building of this size,

they needed to drive 923 of these concrete piles

from above the water down into the lake bed.

Building on the water

is obviously, like, a major challenge.

We made piles from floating pontoons in the water.

This was something we’d never done before.

It takes six months,

but finally, the last pile goes in.

Now, they need to create dry land

so they can build on top of the piles.

You build a cofferdam,

which basically means you put down a perimeter.

So we create a sheet piling around the building pit.

And we make it watertight

by welding all the slots of the sheet piling.

And then you drain all the seawater

and you expose the seabed.

With the cofferdam built and the water emptied,

the team brings in 28 tons of steel and concrete

to create the basement and parking garages,

which will be below water level.

Then, in March 2020, as they’re about

to start building up, Mother Nature strikes...

...bringing with her unprecedented high water level.

I got the call from our construction company.

The whole parking garage was flooded.

I was like, oh gosh, how are we going to resolve this?

It wasn’t a good day.

We need to call the fire department to help us out.

And it was a couple of days of pumping all of

the water back out in the lake

to make our spot dry again.

In June 2020, the team prepares

to start work on the main apartment building,

which will extend 164 feet out over the water.

Hopefully.

The shape of the building basically wants to tip over.

It’s down to the team to stop it from doing exactly that.

They have load-bearing walls

and they have load-bearing corridors.

It’s almost just that you step one step out every time.

Now, they just have to build them,

making sure the two sides meet perfectly in the middle.

You build it almost like a bridge.

So you have to make sure that

you actually meet into the single point.

So that was quite nerve-wracking, let’s say.

To make things even trickier,

the soil on one side is composed of softer sand.

So when the building settles, that side will drop more.

So we try to build it a bit more upwards.

So once it settles, they would end at the same level.

We did a lot of survey, a lot of double-checking the survey.

It’s essential they get their calculations right.

The buildings have to settle to within

three-quarters of an inch of one another.

We were actually quite nervous about how the building

would behave during construction,

if they would actually meet together at the same spot.

If we made it uneven,

then that would set us back months, even years.

After two years of construction, the team prepares

to put in the 11th and final floor.

There was this moment where the two sides would kiss.

In March 2021, the moment arrives.

We expected 20 millimeters differences,

but then in practice,

it actually went better than we expected.

So there was only a difference of 10 millimeters.

It was total relief for all of the project team.

With less than half of an inch difference

between the two sides,

the team turns to finishing the building,

which includes fitting 42 high-performance windows

that are wind and watertight and strong enough to walk on,

allowing you to look out onto the water below.

And wrapping the exterior

in 170 tons of marine-grade aluminum tiles.

With that complete, the team has one final hurdle--

letting the water back in.

That’s the moment when you see if your building is watertight.

In the Netherlands, the construction team is ready

to open the dam that has been holding back

the waters of Lake Ijmeer

from around the Sluishuis apartment building.

We start letting water in on a Friday afternoon.

Although they had applied a thick liquid membrane

to waterproof the building,

you don’t know if it’s worked until you test it.

We were a bit nervous on the water tightness of the building.

Any problems will set back the schedule by months.

When we came back on Monday, all the land was gone

and right back on the water.

And we didn’t flood the basement,

so that was also a good sign.

That was a moment I will never forget.

It was the way it turned out,

the way the water came into the building.

It was perfect.

On June 28, 2022,

after four years of construction,

the dramatic Sluishuis rises from the water.

I’m really sure there’s no view like it in the whole Amsterdam

and the whole of the Netherlands.

When you look around, you can see Amsterdam,

or on the other side, you can see the water.

It’s magnificent.

And also from every corner, you see it

in totally different shape,

and every light is giving a different look.

It’s really amazing, and I’m so lucky to live here.

The private terraces for residents

and the steps that the public can use

cascade down to the stunning courtyard and marina,

elegantly bringing the community together.

I would love to have an apartment.

It’s a really special place there.

You would really be able to look down into the waters.

It’s a very special project,

and I had a lot of fun working on it,

so really good to look back on.

Whether you’re a resident or just visiting,

you come to enjoy the views, go boating, or go swimming.

It’s a super smart design

that creates an amazing sense of community.

We are very proud to be able to contribute

to Amsterdam with this building,

and I hope the people in the neighborhood,

but also in the city, have this kind of same sense

of pride when they look at it.

The magic of the Sluishuis is that it’s not private,

it’s not public, it’s communal.

Figuring out how to build a three-towered luxury hotel

over a busy road in Chicago, that’s easy.

But designing a 101-story,

1,200-foot tall hotel in the Windy City,

that’s a different kind of breeze.

To keep the wind from wreaking havoc,

architects got creative by giving it the VIP treatment.

Unlike other guests,

they didn’t give it a nice room or even a suite.

They left an entire floor completely empty,

just so the wind can blow through.

In Chicago, extraordinary architecture has broken the mold

time and time again.

I think the true passion of this city lies

in our ability to provide a world-class skyline

and maintain that world-class skyline.

America’s first skyscraper was built here in 1885.

And since then, architectural A-listers

from Frank Lloyd Wright

to Mies van der Rohe

have left their mark on the city.

Architecture is very important to the city of Chicago.

It’s really part of the fabric of the city.

So there’s a lot of interest

any time a new structure is built,

particularly a super-tall structure.

So when developer Sean Linnane

decides to build on a prime waterfront plot,

he wants something extraordinay to fill it.

We’re right at the corner

inay meets Lake Michigan.

It is such a high-profile site

that it needed to be something really special.

He brings in an architect he likes and respects,

someone who knows Chicago well,

world-famous Jeanne Gang.

Well, I’ve always thought of Chicago as a place

where all the tall buildings

are in a kind of dialogue with each other.

So I kind of approached it like,

you know, I’m a new kid on the block

and seeing what I have in common with the other ones.

The St. Regis Tower

was really deserving of something special.

And that’s really what the challenge to Jeanne was.

Jeanne, we need you to create some cachet for this building,

something that will resonate with the buyers

and make them inclined to spend as much money

as they’re going to have to spend to live in this building.

To do that, she’s gonna need to throw out the rule book.

Most skyscrapers stick to the same basic formula.

You have vertical cores, stacked floors,

and a glass facade because it works.

But Jeanne wanted to reinvent the type.

So how do you take those familiar pieces,

and twist them into something new?

Not only that,

Jeanne Gang’s facing one of

the most complicated sights in the city.

Set between Lakeshore East Park and the Chicago River,

it has a road running right through the middle of it.

And so that led me to thinking of breaking the building

into three separate elements,

vertical elements, where we could raise and lower the base

so people can go from the park to the river.

Gang’s idea is to take a solid building

and create the illusion of three interlocking towers.

But that will bring with it a unique set of problems.

The first job will be to make room for the road

that runs through the middle of the building.

But having lifted the middle tower up,

they’ve somehow got to make sure

the rest of the building stays up too.

Then, Gang wants the towers to ripple and mirror

like the neighboring Lake Michigan.

All while making sure the almost

1,200-foot-tall structure doesn’t sway too much

in the Windy City.

So we’ve done a lot of buildings in our relatively

short history of our company.

St. Regis Tower is by far the tallest.

It truly is a super-tall structure.

And it pushed us in places

that we weren’t used to being pushed.

In September 2016, work begins

on the massive concrete foundations.

In Chicago, we like to think that we pour concrete faster

than anybody in the world.

Time is really money when

it comes to a construction schedule.

And a project of this scale involves

a huge concrete pour.

So the building is very tall and very heavy.

And to support such heavy loads requires special foundations.

These were like 100-foot-tall columns,

some of them as big as 10-foot in diameter.

By March 2017, they’re ready to get out of the ground

and start building the towers.

But there’s a complication.

So we have three stems, a 100-story stem,

a 75-story stem, and a 50-story stem.

Normally, each would have

its own central core to hold it up.

That 75-story middle mass of the building,

at the base, this is where the drive-through underneath

the building passes through.

So we can’t have a core going through it.

Stage one is to share two cores between the three towers.

We have a 50-story core and a 100-story core stabilizing

the sides of the building.

But on their own, they’re not going to be enough.

So stage two is what

the engineers hope will be a brilliant solution.

There’s a spine wall that connects at the east

and the west core and actually structurally locks

the two together.

If you looked at just this wall between the cores,

it’s close to 300 feet tall.

It’s about 100 foot wide.

The success of this entire project

rests on this wall

holding up the 1,200-foot-tall tower.

That was a big challenge.

We had not built something like this before.

In Chicago, work has started on

the huge concrete wall

which will allow the middle tower of the St. Regis

to float over the road.

But regular old concrete isn’t up to the job.

Not only did they require a strength requirement,

they also required a stiffness requirement

far beyond what’s normally required.

Not all concrete is created equal.

Different ratios of cement, water, aggregate,

or rocks produce different strengths and stiffnesses,

all depending on how you mix them and how long they set for.

So we were creating a high-performance concrete mix

that was going to be able to give us the necessary strength

as well as the stiffness.

By October 2017,

the building is beginning to take shape.

The general concept was to basically, like,

push the cores up and then build the floors,

um, connect the floors to the already constructed core.

So the cores were always going up ahead,

followed by the, uh, floor construction.

When it’s finished, St. Regis will be huge,

almost 1,200 feet high at the tallest tower.

But for architect Jeanne Gang,

it’s essential not to overpower the skyline.

For me, tall buildings are not about how tall they are.

It’s about how good the architecture is

and what it does for the city.

Inspired by nature, Gang’s buildings,

like Chicago’s Aqua Tower,

have been softened by the curves of hills, valleys, and pools.

I’m a lifelong student

of natural forces and natural things.

For St. Regis,

she turns to something much, much smaller.

This tower was--

really kind of came out of a shape

that she found in nature, which is a frustum.

A frustum is essentially a pyramid

with the top lopped off.

It’s gemstones.

What I did with this building is, like,

start with this kind of smaller module,

and then add it together, flipping it

and finding ways that this geometry could interlock.

Curved buildings bring organic forms to a skyline.

They’re a clever way to bring movement to a cityscape,

which makes it feel more inviting and less imposing.

But to pull off the organic shape

is gonna take some serious engineering.

Each of the three stems, at its narrowest, is 85 feet,

at its widest is 95 feet,

and it comes in and out about every 13 stories.

With the floors regularly increasing

and then decreasing in size,

the challenge is how to stack them on top of each other

so the building’s weight is directed down

into its base.

In typical high-rises,

floors are built the same size,

so that the structural walls

are placed directly above each other

and transferring the building’s load vertically

down to the foundations.

But that system doesn’t work well

when floors are continually

increasing or decreasing in size.

Picture a weight like electricity.

Columns are your copper wires.

Slide a column on one floor out of line with the one below,

and the circuit breaks.

The current backs up, stress spikes,

and there’s going to be damage.

The engineers come up with a simple,

but effective solution.

So what we did is at every floor,

we stepped the columns out about four to five inches.

We simply oversized the columns by four inches,

and each one stacks on top the one below it

with a slight offset.

As the floors go up, the next challenge

is creating a facade that emphasizes

the changing shapes of each of the three towers.

Jeanne’s idea was to use different gradients of glass,

or six different gradients of glass,

to kind of accentuate this movement.

For every 12 floors, we have a variety

of glass colors that goes from darker,

you know, greenish blue to lighter.

But standard tinting won’t work on a building this big

and with such a complicated color scheme.

The thing about glass is not all glass is made the same.

Glass achieves its different

colors and tints through different assemblies.

You can coat the glass with a film,

but over time, this can crack.

Or you can add metal oxides as the glass is made.

Different metals produce different colors.

But it’s difficult to get

the exact shades needed consistently.

The problem with that is it makes the glass look

different in different kinds of light.

And we didn’t want the glass to look different.

We just wanted the color to look different.

The solution lies 4,000 miles away

at a specialist German glassmaker.

Here, a pioneering technique produces

colored glass consistently at scale.

This is the first project that really did this.

It’s a coating process for the glass that is very precise.

This glass remains the same color regardless

of the angle you look at it from.

So that was really exciting to innovate on that level.

While the glass is created,

the team building the three towers faces

its next challenge.

When you get a column that’s 1,200 feet tall

and you put load on it,

it will shorten by a number of inches.

Now, that’s not such a challenge when

the whole building is the same height.

But when you have a part that’s 100 stories

that wants to shorten more,

a 75-story piece in between that shortens a little less,

and a 50-story portion that shortens even less,

that needs to be programmed into the design,

and in particular, into the construction.

It’s essential the towers settle to the exact same place,

so the floors match up.

So the columns are made in the order of like,

you know, half inch or three-quarters of inch,

like, you know, higher than where they’re supposed to be.

But the floor below them is also a little bit taller.

And then you end up with

the floors sloping outwards and upwards.

And then as the load comes down,

they basically gradually creep down into a level condition.

One by one, the towers climb to their limit,

with the west tower reaching its full height

of almost 1,200 feet.

And bringing with it a new challenge.

The higher you go, the windier it is up there.

In Chicago,

the construction team behind the super-tall St. Regis Tower

needs to find a way to stop its swaying,

especially as gusts in the Windy City

can exceed 80 miles per hour.

So that the person up at the highest floors in the building,

as they’re sitting down with a glass of wine,

they’re not seeing a slosh in the wine or the chandelier

or the window drapings clicking against the window.

For the 1,200-foot tower,

they turn to a tried and true method.

We have a linear horizontal tank

filled with water to a very specific dimension.

And the wave action, as it goes back and forth,

back and forth, exactly matches the sway of the building.

As the building goes to and fro,

the water in the tank goes fro and to.

Four dampeners are fitted across the top of the tower.

But on their own, they’re not enough.

When we look at the building

as the wind from its strongest direction looks at it,

it’s a very, very narrow building.

This tells us with your eye why wind force

is blowing in this direction.

It creates a very large engineering challenge

for this tower.

Their solution is a first for the team and the city.

So there are some structural elements in this building

that we have never done before.

The radical idea is to create what in the trade

is called a blow-through.

Putting a blow-through here at the widest part

of the upper stem of the building,

25 feet tall, it’s effectively two stories tall,

there’s no glass, there’s no interior slab,

there’s no interior walls.

The wind that’s hitting above that

goes down and goes through it.

The wind that’s just coming straight through goes through.

And the wind that’s coming across the building

can also go through.

So it just takes away that added lateral load on the building.

With the tower stabilized, all that remains is to cover it

in the color-graded glass

that changes from light to dark blue-green

every 12 floors.

In September 2021, having cost a billion U.S. dollars,

the St. Regis Chicago is finally complete.

At 1,191 feet and 101 stories,

it claims its crown as

the city’s third tallest building.

What do I think that St. Regis Tower

brings to Chicago?

I think it brings a world-class building.

It’s world-class architecture, and it really puts us on a map.

Inside, the 192 hotel rooms and 393 apartments

take advantage of its extraordinary location.

Our guests have unmatched views of the city,

the lake, the river, and then they also have a ton

of natural light that floods into the building.

To say that the views are breathtaking is just,

it’s a complete understatement.

Thanks to the way the three towers

are staggered in height,

they come with an added advantage.

We can use the rooftops of those

stepping-down elements for the pool,

for the garden, for the outdoor space.

Above all, the building’s unique

nature-inspired shape creates an organic, flowing facade,

enhanced by the changes in the colored glass,

which reflect the blues of the surrounding lake and sky.

A true visual masterpiece in a city of skyscrapers.

When you add that iconic building to an already

immaculate and perfect skyscape,

it’s just, it makes it all that much better.

It makes me proud to be able to be part of this city

with such an important architectural history.

Some building designs are so ahead of the curve,

they transcend the reason they were built in the first place,

becoming works of art themselves.

One such treasure is found in Paris, France,

an architectural statement so bold,

so controversial and innovative,

it deserves to hang on a museum wall itself.

Except, come on, that’d be impossible.

It’s an enormous building.

It would be like trying to frame the Eiffel Tower.

When architects compete, history gets made.

Architectural competitions have inspired some of history’s

greatest buildings,

from the iconic dome of Florence’s Cathedral

to the Sydney Opera House in Australia.

In Paris, France,

both the Palais Garnier and the Eiffel Tower

are competition winners that help make the city stand out.

But in the late 60s, it’s looking for something new.

It’s lost its place at the center

of the cultural universe to New York.

They decide the solution is a building so extraordinary,

it will bring the world’s attention back home.

So the city launches a bold international competition

to design an art center.

For the first time ever, it will be open to architects

from outside France.

Up-and-coming English and Italian architects

Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano can’t resist the challenge.

It was a big, big competition.

We are young bad boys.

So when we saw this competition,

we said, let’s make a bit of drama.

Out of 681 entries, their submission is number 493.

t’s a futuristic vision to make Paris a new cultural powerhouse.

Its radical experimental design sprawls over 10 stories

and 1.1 million square feet

to create a space that is utterly flexible.

It must be free of

supporting columns and walls used in traditional buildings,

despite having floors as big as two American football fields.

So they have to work out how to stop it from falling down.

Then they’ve got to find somewhere

to put all the surfaces that would be hidden

in the internal walls and columns

of a traditional building.

When their design wins,

no one is more shocked than Rogers and Piano.

When we won the competition,

we got a press conference.

Nobody can speak French.

I’ve got my school French-- as language, I mean.

Very bad.

And I went on for 15 minutes.

Everybody was absolutely mad about that.

Architect Alan Stanton becomes part of the team.

A lot of us were in our 20s or early 30s,

so we had limited experience.

But what we did have was massive energy

and kind of commitment and enthusiasm,

and I think creative skills.

Having won, they now have to turn

their extraordinary idea into a reality.

Nothing like this had ever been attempted.

But the architects were young, confident, and fearless.

Nothing seemed impossible.

In early 1972, work starts on

the five-acre site in the heart of the city.

The amount of excavation was huge.

They dug this huge hole,

and we’ve got to fill it up with something.

Amazingly,

they break ground without finalizing the details

of how to build it.

I do remember looking down this hole,

and thinking, God, we haven’t sorted the structure out.

I do remember sort of feeling it,

just a slight twangs of panic with that.

Not really surprising

given the challenges inherent in the design.

The philosophy was make something

that is not intimidating.

It’s a place for art and culture for everybody.

it was a feeling that

this is a building for everybody.

And we’d like people to go there,

and there’d always be something different going on.

There’d always be some sort of event,

something changing.

So we needed to have a building that had the possibility

of putting almost any sort of exhibition or event in there.

The revolutionary idea

is to create a huge open-plan space

without a single interior column.

At the time, asking this is like asking for the impossible.

That was the whole challenge.

You couldn’t have a better challenge as an engineer

because the engineering was going to make the building.

In Paris, France,

the designers of the new Pompidou Center

must figure out how to create

an entirely open-plan art space.

The first problem was how to span almost 60 meters

without any intermediate vertical elements.

They turn to an engineering technique

not normally seen in buildings.

Bridges often use Warren trusses.

These types of structures have two beams,

a top cord and a bottom cord,

with triangular shapes in the middle.

Triangles are nature’s most stable shape,

so they keep the structure rigid,

with no wobble or sag, even across huge spans.

The problem, though, is that

where you attach your truss, it creates a huge force

trying to pull the support inwards.

On a bridge,

long spans are often stabilized

by tying them directly into the ground diagonally

with huge weights.

But at Pompidou, you can’t do that in the usual way

because you can’t afford to eat into the public space.

So they designed custom-fabricated,

cast-steel rocker beams known as gerberets.

The heavy truss sits on one end and pushes the seesaw down,

and naturally, the other end tries to fly upward,

but it can’t because it’s held in place by a vertical tie rod

that runs straight down into the ground.

It’s an experiment, and one that goes wrong.

Initial tests on these gerberets were a disaster.

Several of them broke under the load,

so they had to rethink and modify the casting process

in order to make the steel more ductile.

After that, all the beams took the load

and therefore could be signed off

as being ready to be put into place.

Finally, the bespoke megatrusses

are ready to be transported

to the site in Paris.

Not something to be done in rush hour.

It was a logistical nightmare.

The pieces were so big,

they only managed to bring them in

one at a time in the dead of night.

During the day, the huge pieces

of cast steel are craned into position.

The whole thing was put together by about eight men,

and it was like a giant constructor kit.

Even a child can look at the building

and understand how it works,

how it comes together piece by piece.

Finally, the massive floors are in.

But on April 2nd, 1974, President Pompidou dies.

The entire project is under threat.

Pompidou was replaced by Valery Giscard d’Estaing.

He hated the design for the Pompidou Center.

Thousands of hours of design,

two years of grueling on-site work,

is all at serious risk.

There was a moment where we were all terribly worried

that it was not gonna get built.

What saved us was that

all the building contracts had been let,

and it was impossible to reverse that.

So the building had to go ahead.

The team moves on to bring the architects’ vision to life.

It was this I dream,

of making building line machine,

beautiful machine, useful machine, urban machine.

It’s like a motor bicycle.

It’s like something that you can understand how it works.

But there’s a terrible realization.

Without internal walls, flames could rapidly spread,

heating the exposed steel beams to dangerous temperatures,

weakening their structural integrity.

They figure out that in a fire,

the metal columns would lose their structural integrity,

and the building collapse.

Normally, you have two hours to evacuate people,

so that was the requirement.

They could case the columns

in an inflammable material,

but the architects want

the building’s structure to be exposed.

So they need another solution.

The concept there was to fill them with water,

so the water would cool them.

But if you had enough heat on it,

the danger was that any air in them

would expand and blow the water out.

So there was a pump at the top.

If there was a fire, it started circulating the water.

From our point of view, the steel would be sufficient

with the water system to resist the potential fire

that could happen in the building.

But the Pompidou still wasn’t done breaking rules.

Rogers and Piano decided all the essential services,

electricity, plumbing, heating,

would sit exposed on the building’s exterior,

freeing interior space completely.

Normally, services are hidden.

Here, it is one of the key aesthetics of the building,

and therefore they had to be absolutely perfect.

To do that, they make them part of the design,

including color-coding the pipes.

Blue for ventilation, green for plumbing,

and red for the walkway and escalators.

The idea was to animate the architecture.

The escalator system was part of

what we refer to as streets in the sky, if you like.

After five and a half years of construction,

in January 1977,

Piano and Rogers’ Pompidou Center opens its doors.

It’s not love at first sight.

It’s taken some getting used to,

but now it’s world famous.

Looking back at it today,

you can only say the result is extraordinary

and something I’m extremely proud of.

It’s not just an icon. It’s a building that works

the way its creators hoped it would.

Pompidou was conceived as a place for people.

That is really the spirit of the building.

And people come from all over.

It’s very fascinating to see this kind of building,

because it’s really unique.

I simply adore it.

So every year I come here and I go up as a personal ritual.

The Pompidou still welcomes millions each year.

It has kept its promise to be open, unexpected, alive.

And more than anything, it’s for all to enjoy.

You’re making cities better places.

And people better people.

Because it’s about staying together.

It’s about enjoying

and sharing the same values, the same emotion.

So that was very important.