No Stateside Pompidou

When the announcement of the Centre Pompidou × Jersey City partnership was made in June 2021, the first five-year contract between the world-famous Paris museum and the New Jersey city that is located just 15 minutes from Lower Manhattan would have started this year, when the outpost was anticipated to open. Instead, as multiple reports indicate, the state legislature just pulled $24 million in funding for the project that was being designed by Jason Long from OMA's New York office, effectively killing the project.

The official correspondence from the New Jersey Economic Development Authority to the Pompidou (PDF link) blames the “indefinite pause” on “the ongoing impact of COVID and multiple global conflicts on the supply chain, rising costs, an irreconcilable operating gap, and the corresponding financial burdens [the project] will create for New Jersey’s taxpayers.” Outside of official channels, Jersey City Mayor Steve Fulop alleges political retribution, saying New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy pulled the funds after Fulop withdrew his support for Tammy Murphy, the governor's wife, in her unsuccessful campaign for US Senator. The New York Times headline sums it up: “A French Museum Collides With New Jersey Politics.”

Retribution or not, this week's news over the pulled funds puts the Centre Pompidou × Jersey City project in the same camp as OMA New York's earlier Marina Abramovic Institute for the Preservation of Performance Art, which was unveiled in 2012 but canceled in 2017 after funds could not be raised to match budget increases. Coincidentally, both of these institutional OMA projects would have reused old buildings: a theater-turned-tennis center in Hudson, New York, for the Marina Abramovic Institute, and a 1912 trolley building in Jersey City for the Pompidou outpost.

This latest news comes just a week after the Centre Pompidou announced that a team led by Moreau Kusunoki is undertaking the renovation of the iconic Paris building designed by Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers in the 1970s (it will close from 2025 until 2030 for the renovations). Other Pompidou projects are also moving forward, regardless of Covid, rising costs, politics, and other issues hardly restricted to New Jersey alone. These include the KANAL - Centre Pompidou in Brussels, which was unveiled in 2018 and is set to open in 2025, and the “art factory” in the Parisian suburb of Massy that was announced in 2019 and will open in 2026.