Centre Georges Pomidou, Paris

I found these images of the Pomidou Centre in Paris in the book “Mapping An Illustrated guide to Graphic Navigational Systems” by Roger Fawcett-Tang and William Owen. The signage system was developed by Ruedi Bauer and is based on the idea of ‘spatial explosion’ of information usually contained in a single panel. The idea of having the same words close together appearing in different languages was to express the interdisciplinarity and multi-culturalism present at the Centre Pompidou.

As you can see from the images, the signage works on both surfaces, such as banners on the side of the building, as well as non-surfaces, such as freely suspended neon typographic elements. The idea of the use of many different bright colours along with the many different words was to bring about a sense of energy and immediacy, which I certainly think the Centre does very well.

As well as the signage of typography, there are also pictograms that also are conveyed through the use of bright colours like yellow and blue. These two colours particularly compliment each other because they stand out well on each other and so remain legible. I think the colour use is key within the Pomidou because of the way that they want the visitors to feel a sense of energy from the architecture inside, which is something I think is really interesting. When looking at the project expansion from the brief that I have chosen, I think analysing the architecture that the signage will be on is very important and so I will have to bear this in mind.