Without the computer, the process of conception would lack an integral component. An example is the reconstruction of the Maxim Gorky Theatre at Petit Quevilly, France, which is scheduled for completion in 2001. They won the competition leading to this project in the same week that they were commissioned to design the restaurant at the Pompidou Centre. This theatre is essentially an interior project. The programme requires them to work with a series of old dwellings linked together like a rambling, ridge-roofed farm.
Visitors are sure to feel as though they're in the belly of a large vertebrate.
Although far removed from the curves of the Pompidou Centre restaurant, the taut lines of the theatre's grand arches are no less impressive. The Beaubourg project is, however, undeniably audacious. The structural grid of the building as conceived by Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers,' they wrote, 'became our own conceptual grid. Inflated and deformed, it accommodates the restaurant's functional programmes while prompting our own development of the site. The skin-envelope, the deformed grid, floats and insinuates itself between the main beams.