The roof's bespoke and complex geometries were created using Arup's form-finding software but inspired as the story goes, by a woven bamboo Chinese hat which Ban took along to meetings. Much effort was made to ensure the roof – with no straight lines, double-curvature engineering on beams and tesselating layers of hexagons – appeared as natural and elegant as possible. Quite the opposite of the original "inside out" approach of Rogers & Piano's seminal work in Paris.
The Pompidou-Metz is first branch of the Pompidou to exist outside of Paris and it operates on model that the city who hosts the museum will broadly pay ofr it and enjoy the related "Bilbao-effect" of cultural tourism. The museum has no collection of its own, the inaugural exhibition, starting this week, is called "Masterpieces?" Beatrice Galilee