The Jean-Marie Tjibaou Cultural Centre

Judged on purpose, structure and site. Much is compelled. The shells’ curved backs and their slatted double skin are the ventilating device: take them away and the rooms need machines in a hot, humid, windy climate. The scatter of cases along a ridge, in villages, follows from the site and from the programme’s model of the Kanak settlement, the great house and its lesser huts along an allée. The low range is set into the slope so that the shells read from the lagoon as standing on the land. What yields: the upper part of each tall shell holds no room, its height image and draught together; the low range could be another building without loss of idea; and the number of cases and their three heights are a programme’s choice.

Score: 8.0 / 10

Three things can be stated, and they hold. That a culture’s institution can be built in that culture’s architectural idea, the case and the village, without copying a single hut, the type translated into the means of the builder’s own time. That a building can live with its climate rather than seal itself against it, with the wind made legible in its skin. And, not made by the architect, that the state that paid for it, after a decade of violence, was building reconciliation in a European’s hand for the people whose leader it names: a Kanak form realised by a French commission and an Italian office. What holds the axis lowest of the eleven: much of what the centre gives is mood, the first meaning is shared with critical regionalism generally, and the third is partly uttered against the work.

Score: 7.9 / 10

Elevation is real and repeated, though moderate. Seen from the lagoon or the road, the rank of tall open shells against the southern Pacific sky is an image of calm power, something between a village, a grove and a row of unfinished vessels. Inside a tall case the light falls through the slats in bars and changes with sun and cloud, and the wind is heard moving through the skin, a sound the building makes and does not merely admit. The walk between the villages, half open and half sheltered, is a sequence of slow alternations. What holds the axis: the elevation is of one kind, grave and quiet, and the low range, where most of the visit happens, does not rise. It is one image carried several times, with real height.

Score: 8.2 / 10

Archetype is built here, not evoked. The plan is a village: three groups of cases along a path, as Kanak settlements are ordered along an allée toward the chief’s great house. The case itself, a tall woven shell round a centre, is the great house, the house of the ancestors and of speech, rendered as structure rather than ornament; the ribs stand as the posts and battens of the hut stand. The grounds add the Kanak path, a planted narrative of creation, life and death walked in sequence. The shell left open at the top builds a second archetype, the unfinished house. What holds the axis below the gate: the visitor enters through the low range rather than into the case as into the great house, and the archetype is strongest seen from outside.

Score: 8.3 / 10

The inheritance is twofold: the European museum and cultural centre as a box of galleries, among them Piano’s own Menil Collection (8.0) and the Centre Pompidou (8.4) he made with Richard Rogers and Gianfranco Franchini; and the high-tech tradition of expressed structure that Piano helped found. The departure: a high-tech office turning its whole method toward a non-European culture’s form and toward a climate, working with an anthropologist, and building not a container but a settlement of open shells in timber. The stake was considerable: a commission at the heart of a recent civil conflict, where a European architect risked both pastiche and appropriation, on a remote site, with a structural type without precedent at that height. Held below the top because the turn drew on a regionalist current already strong by 1991.

Score: 8.4 / 10

Substitute another form and see what the centre stops knowing. Put the same programme in a single building, a box or a pavilion of galleries, and it loses three things: that Kanak culture is a settlement and not a collection, a set of houses along a path; that the place’s wind and light belong inside the building; and that the culture it houses is still being made, which only the open shells say. The form is the instrument of that knowledge in the cases, the walk and the grounds. What holds the axis: the low range, where most of the use lies, is a container of ordinary rooms under the shells’ image, and much of what visitors do happens in space whose form says little.

Score: 8.4 / 10

Evidence over promise, across twenty-eight years. The centre has been studied continuously: in the literature of critical regionalism and of building with climate; in postcolonial critique of who designs for whom; in anthropology, through Alban Bensa’s own account of the collaboration; in engineering, for the ventilating skin. The debate has not exhausted, because the questions it raises, the translation of a culture’s form, authorship, and the state as patron, have only sharpened. Formal return yields too: the varied spacing of the slats, the three heights, the relation of shell to low range. What holds the axis: the formal yield is narrower than the greatest buildings’, a single type in variation; much of the return is to the argument round the building rather than in it; and the span is short.

Score: 8.0 / 10

The field is the cultural building and the architecture of place in the late twentieth century, and building in the Pacific. Intrinsic force: a real reorganisation of possibility, showing that the most technically advanced practice could serve a non-European, oral culture’s idea of dwelling and the passive control of climate at once, and making the collaboration of architect and anthropologist a method. It is held down by its sources: critical regionalism had been named a decade before, and Glenn Murcutt, Hassan Fathy and others had already joined climate and place. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the centre is among the most cited examples of building for an indigenous culture and of passive climatic design in a cultural building; it marked a turn in Piano’s own practice toward timber and place; and indigenous cultural centres in Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific are often measured against it. But no school or type descends from it, and its reach lies mainly in teaching and argument.

Score: 8.0 / 10

Weighed on form, then use, then fabric, over twenty-eight years. The form survives whole: ten cases, three villages, the walk and the grounds as built, and the image does not read as a period piece of the 1990s. The use has been continuous, as the cultural centre of the ADCK, though how fully the Kanak community has taken the centre up has been questioned, which bears lightly. The fabric is timber on a tropical marine site with cyclones, and it has weathered as it was meant to, to silver grey; its present maintenance is not verified here. Presence is real but not the widest. The figure is the one the span earns where nothing is charged against the form.

Score: 8.5 / 10

Judged as command of building, structure and engineering included. The command is high and load-bearing in the cases: curved ribs of laminated iroko held by steel ties and stainless fittings, built to stand tall on an exposed, cyclonic site; an outer skin of slats spaced to break the wind and an inner skin of louvres to regulate it, worked out with wind studies; the joining of timber and steel resolved as a visible system, detail by detail, in Piano’s manner. The detail serves the idea, so the craft is not applied but is the building. What holds the axis: the scale is modest, the cases are variations on one section, and the low range is careful rather than commanding. It does not reach the order of Sydney’s geometry or the Pantheon’s dome.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: the tallest open shell on the lagoon side and the planted Kanak path on the ground. They obey one law, that of a culture’s settlement along a way, its houses standing in planted ground; the walk links the villages as the path links its stages, and timber, plant and wind are the common matter. The three heights and the varied spacing of the slats are one system in variation. What holds the axis: the low range is governed by a different law, that of a modern institution’s rooms, glazed and serviced, and it carries the cases as a plinth carries objects; the join of the two is resolved in plan but felt in use. The range covered is moderate, and narrowness is not coherence.

Score: 8.4 / 10

Five orders are held. A people’s culture and memory, built into the plan as settlement and into the grounds as myth. The natural order, wind, light, vegetation and lagoon, built into the skin. History and the state, in a commission that answers a war and names a dead leader. The sacred, in the case as the house of the ancestors and of speech. Labour and craft, in the visible making. They are integrated by the village plan and the shell, not merely listed. What holds the axis lowest: the household and the individual life are absent, for the centre is a public institution only; the sacred is translated, not inhabited; and the political order is present more as condition than as form. At this size, holding a culture, its climate and its history in one structure is a real achievement.

Score: 7.6 / 10