In 1969, President Pompidou took a decision to dedicate the Plateau Beaubourg area of Paris to the construction of a multidisciplinary cultural centre of an entirely new type, injecting new impetus to a series of projects that had hitherto failed to come to fruition: the plan to build a major public reading library in Paris, with the biggest visitor capacity for any such initiative since the Liberation. And beyond that, the rehabilitation of the National Museum of Modern Art, back then housed in a wing of the Palais de Tokyo that was in a state of semi-abandonment for lack of resources and space.

Besides creating a new library and the transfer of the National Museum of Modern Art, the new Centre project incorporated the activities of the Centre for Contemporary Art in rue Berryer and the small team around François Mathey, which had pursued a dynamic policy of contemporary art exhibitions within the museum of decorative arts.

The 1970s saw the addition of a centre for musical creation based on the vision of composer Pierre Boulez, who had decided to leave France a few years previously to protest against the state of contemporary music in our country. The creation of the IRCAM project would at last enable him to return to France.