At the beginning of the 70s, Parisian specialists in museum management encountered a dilemma of exhibiting the art of the 20th century. There was no additional space in the Louvre and Orsay museums; the art treasures had to be kept in storerooms or shown at temporary exhibitions. The French president of the time, Georges Pompidou, announced a contest for projects for constructing a contemporary art center. In addition to a museum, there had to be a library, a cinema, and a concert hall. The main requirement was that it had to be a non-classic building; they wanted to see high-tech architecture. The Anglo-Italian team of young architects Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano won. The structure they proposed to erect resembled a factory turned inside out, whose communications, to increase the exhibition space, were output to the outer side. Today, colored pipes: green for plumbing, yellow for electricity, white for heating, blue for air conditioning wrap the building, creating the image of a living mechanism. The square in front of the museum follows the conceptual design of the building: the air ducts are output directly from the pavement and resemble submarine periscopes. The Centre Pompidou doesn’t have a magnificent entrance; there, behind an ordinary door, is an information desk, similar to those at airports. Just like in an air harbor, escalators take visitors through panoramic glassed-in spaces to different floors. The Museum of Modern Art is located on the upper two. On the fifth floor, there are works from the early 20th century to the 60s; on the sixth, there are works of the late 20th to early 21st centuries and temporary exhibitions. One of the largest collections of contemporary art in the world (second only to the New York museum) owns paintings by Picasso, Chagall, Kandinsky, Malevich, Leger, Pollock, and Magritte. Several halls are dedicated to designer furniture, architectural projects, and installations by young artists yet unknown to the general public. All exhibition halls have mobile internal partitions, making it easy to change the setup of the galleries and the content even of a permanent exhibition. After inspecting the collections, you can go up to the roof, from the observation deck of which opens the best view of the Beaubourg area where the museum stands. Also, an outward transparent escalator goes to the roof from the gable facade of the art center. Contemporary art continues underground: there is an industrial design center and an avant-garde music laboratory.