ABSTRACT
Coincidentally, at the age of 23, two years before Alsop joined Price, and while still a third-year student at the Pop-influenced Architectural Association in London, he possessed a curriculum vitae which included a rather astonishing achievement. In 1971 he submitted a solo design to the Centre Georges Pompidou international design competition – a scheme signed off by his tutor Warren Chalk. Alsop took second place to the celebrated winning design by Renzo Piano & Richard Rogers – beating Foster + Partners into third place. His precocious project was obviously influenced by Archigram and already exhibiting Priceian traits because, totally in the spirit of his employer-to-be, it proposed that the art museum should not be a building at all, but function as an open green space in the form of an undulating Parisian landscape comprising two hills and a valley under which the Centre’s facilities would be interred 05.2 . Alsop’s submission was ‘pure anti-architecture’; in the sense that it was avoiding the issue of a hard-edge building and totally echoing the mood of the time, i.e., that modern architecture was a complete disaster.
