Hoping to renew the idea of Paris as a leading city of culture and art, it was proposed to move the Musée d'Art Moderne to this new location.

At first the debate concerned Les Halles, but as the controversy settled, in 1968, President Charles de Gaulle announced the Plateau Beaubourg as the new site for the library.

A year later in 1969, Georges Pompidou, the new president, adopted the Beaubourg project and decided it to be the location of both the new library and a centre for the contemporary arts.

The selection was announced in 1971 at a "memorable press conference" where the contrast between the sharply-dressed Pompidou and "hairy young crew" of architects represented a "grand bargain between radical architecture and establishment politics.

[10] The Centre Pompidou, initially met with dismay akin to the Eiffel Tower's reception in its time, is now widely regarded as an artwork in its own merit.

But two decades later, while reporting on Rogers' winning the Pritzker Prize in 2007, The New York Times noted that the design of the Centre "turned the architecture world upside down" and that "Mr. Rogers earned a reputation as a high-tech iconoclast with the completion of the 1977 Pompidou Centre, with its exposed skeleton of brightly coloured tubes for mechanical systems".

The Pritzker jury said the Pompidou "revolutionised museums, transforming what had once been elite monuments into popular places of social and cultural exchange, woven into the heart of the city.

When Dominique Bozo returned to the Centre in 1981 as Director of the Musée National d'Art Moderne, he re-installed the museum, bringing out the full range of its collections and displaying the many major acquisitions that had been made.

The new museum's building was designed by the architect Shigeru Ban with a curving and asymmetrical pagoda-like roof topped by a spire and punctured by upper galleries.

[37] In 2014, plans were released for a temporary satellite of the Centre Pompidou in the northern French town of Maubeuge close to the Belgian border.

[38] In 2015, the city authorities in Libourne, a town in south-western France, proposed a Pompidou branch housed in a former military base called Esog.

[39] In 2019, the Centre Pompidou announced plans to open a 22,000 m2 (240,000 sq ft) conservation, exhibition and storage space in Massy (Essonne) by 2025.

Portraiture and the influence of Picasso will be among the subjects explored in the permanent display, organised by the Pompidou's deputy director Brigitte Leal.

Housed in a former Citroën garage which was transformed by a team comprising ces noAarchitecten (Brussels), EM2N (Zurich) and Sergison Bates architects (London), the new centre brings together the 12,200 sq ft (1,130 m2) Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, an architecture centre (CIVA Foundation) and public spaces devoted to culture, education and leisure.

[45] The Brussels-Capital region — which acquired the 16,000 sq ft (1,500 m2) Art Deco-style building in October 2015 — is the main funder project, with the conversion costing €122 million.

However, the scheme did not materialize for several years, reportedly due to the lack of a legal framework for a non-profit foreign institution to operate in China.

[49][50] Other projects include the Pompidou's joint venture with the King Abdulaziz Centre for World Culture, an arts complex incorporating a museum in Dhahran, the building of which has stalled.

[53][54] There have been rumours of a pop-up Pompidou satellite museum in Brazil since Alain Seban announced the plan for these temporary locations back in 2012.

The Culture Ministry appoints its directors and controls its gestion, which is nevertheless independent, as Etablissement public à caractère administratif since its creation.

[59] In 1999, the heirs of Alphonse Kann requested the return of Georges Braque's The Guitar Player, which the Centre Pompidou had acquired from Heinz Berggruen in 1981.

[60] In 2011, Centre Pompidou admitted that it held three paintings, Les Peupliers (Poplars), Arbres (Trees), and Composition by the artist Fédor Löwenstein that had been looted during the Nazi occupation of France.

[61] In 2021, after the French government restituted a looted Max Pechtstein painting to the heirs of Hugo Simon, the Centre Pompidou held an exhibition in a tribute to the persecuted art collector.