Pompidou museum planning a satellite site

Paris made a bold move in 1977 by building a modern art museum wrapped in large multicolored pipes in the heart of the city. Now, French art authorities are planning another audacious act: a satellite of the Pompidou Center that looks like a Chinese peasant’s hat.

While most of France’s great museums are in the capital, this will be the first major national museum to open a branch outside Paris.

The Pompidou Center Metz in eastern France, near the country’s borders with Germany, Luxembourg and Belgium, is due to open in 2008. The new facility will show rotating exhibitions from the Paris museum’s 56,000 treasures that rarely are seen because of space limitations. Only about 1,300 works can be shown at one time in the main Pompidou Center.

The expansion comes as part of a new trend in French museums to branch out to better expose their massive collections. The Louvre plans to open a sister museum in the northern town of Lens in 2009.

Heading the new Pompidou’s three-man design team is award-winning Japanese architect Shigeru Ban, who drew inspiration from a conical bamboo hat.

“I bought the hat six years ago in a Chinese clothes shop in Paris when I was already thinking about ideas for roofs,” Ban said in an interview.

Playing off the conical theme but to a softer effect, the roof of the Metz museum will rise to a rounded peak at the top and have a gently rippled brim, according to design plans. It will sit atop a gallery space of 32,800 square feet that, like the Paris Pompidou, will have glass-paneled walls and panoramic views.

Construction of the Pompidou museum is set to start in a city park in January 2006, with the price tag estimated at $43 million, museum officials said. The project will be funded by local, regional and national government budgets.