Simulacra and Simulation

Baudrillard criticizes the architecture of the Centre Pompidou in Paris, which he calls the “Beaubourg.” He attempts to define the building by calling it a “machine” and a “thing.” Known for its exposed circuitry and plumbing, The Centre Pompidou was built in the 1970s as a communal space for art and the first Public Information Library. Baudrillard describes it as a black hole that swallows everything, and he argues it is emblematic of society’s worship of commercialism and industrialization. He sees it as a hyperreality in which art is copied repeatedly until it is devoid of meaning.

Baudrillard also compares the Centre Pompidou to a dead body, saying that the art that enters immediately dies within it. He relates this analogy to his earlier assertion that simulacra precede reality. In this instance, the simulacra (The Centre Pompidou) precede reality by influencing the type of art that is created. Within the hyperreality of this building, hypermarket and hypercommodity are generated. This is the culmination of the hyperreality, “a kind of total descriptive universe, or integrated circuit that implosion traverses through and through” (67).