By symbolizing the end of elite privileges (culture was finally made available to the most), the Pompidou was being offered to the masses as a transparent (read: democratic), manipulable (read: empowering), enjoyable (read: ideology- free) and larger- then- life (read: inoffensive) Troy horse meant to defuse masses’ scepticism towards the government, which just ten years before had been contested in the street of Paris. Sounds good, right?

Elevated to a symbol of American culture, Disneyland instantly became the equivalent of the ‘Gothic cathedral’ and, as such, sums up a contemporary worldview from which architecture is disappearing.

…architecture is addressed [by Baudrillard] as a double- edged site of enquiry that acts as both a repository of contemporary theoretical practices as well as empirical applications from where a novel understanding of the discipline might extend.

By addressing the building as an empty signifier (just as the Bauhaus lamp reveals the electrical wiring inside, so the Pompidou exposes its content and function according to a relationship that Baudrillard deems totally arbitrary), the Pompidou Centre is downgraded from architectural icon to hyper- functionalist failure.