There are other ways to clean up an area of prostitution/drug dealing without building something ugly. Kings Cross in London was just the same before the Eurostar arrived. They cleaned it up. The old buildings are still there. No great monster building arrived to magically transform the area.

Have you visited the Pompidou? Have you seen how dirty it is? Look up. Look at the pipes. It is not possible to clean them. Look at the disgraceful toilets on the (public) ground floor. They are open to the world, openly (still) used for drug dealing and cottaging. Go in there. Smell it.

If you think that the only solution to cleaning an area of a city is by invading it with a massive massive ugly unsympathetic eyesore then you, my friend, are the ignorant one. It’s never been fashionable to say the Pompidou is ugly, but I’d say that anyone today who likes it is just romanticising it blindly. Do you like big dirty pipes Aesthetically? Honestly? Do you really really really like the look of big dirty (once) colourful pipes that are too complicated/expensive to clean? Exactly, no. If this was your house, you would say “my god, how the hell am I ever going to clean it?” Be honest.

Have you travelled up the escalators? Have you looked out of the plastic covering them? No. Because you can’t, because it’s so run down that the plastic is scuffed and yellowed with time. It’s not the luscious curved art nouveau glass found in the cafes round the corner, it’s cheap plastic that served it’s function for a brief moment in time and now should be stripped out. If you can’t admit that, then either you have not been there, or you are ignoring the fact that the building is so run down and tatty looking. It hasn’t aged well. It’s a dump. It was never built to look good for centuries, It’s a whim that lasted a short moment only, but now the local community is expected to endure it forever.

I love contemporary architecture and if the Pompidou was built in Dubai I’d probably still visit it (possibly the Arabs would treat the toilets better than the chain smoking French public). But the fact is, it was injected into a place that looked beautiful. And now it looks awful. I’m sorry that you are blinded by the endless drivelling marketing of the building that was used to justify it’s existence. Tear it down and get something better looking up please. As I say, not a fashionable idea.

A millennium project of the Italians (bless them) was not to build new buildings like the lovely O2 centre (the dome), but to mount massive cleaning operations of many ancient public buildings in many cities. This sort of thing doesn’t make front page Dezeen news.

Do you know that in the 27 years in which the building has been open, it has become the most visited building in Europe and continues to attract some seven million visitors a year, more than the Louvre and the Eiffel Tower combined?

Do you know that half of the total available site was set aside as a public square?

You may feel sorry for Parisians. I on the other hand, feel sorry for your ignorance.

I felt so sorry for the Parisians who had to bear the sight of filthy exposed pipes that should be contained within walls. It wrecked what was once a protected area just like the green belt. It has aged horribly, and is never cleaned because it cannot be.

This surely is a NIMBY, as stated.