Paris’s Centre Pompidou will launch a second satellite space in northern France just four years after opened its first permanent outpost, the Centre Pompidou-Metz, in the northeastern French city of Metz. The new franchise, destined for the small town of Maubeuge—just 275 kilometers (170 miles) to the northwest of Metz—will take up a 3,000-square-meter (about 32,000 square feet) space designed by the architect duo of Pierre Hebbelinck and Pierre de Wit inside the Maubeuge Arsenal, a 17th century building, reports Le Journal des Arts, by way of the Art Newspaper. The new outpost is temporary, and expected to last four years.
The project is said to be budgeted at a cost of €5.8 million (about $7.8 million). The newly elected mayor of Maubeuge, Arnaud Decagny, has committed an annual municipal contribution of €500,000 (about $669,000) to the project. The Pompidou’s move to add another northern outpost may be partly intended to capitalize on Maubeuge’s proximity to Mons, just on the other side of the Belgian border, which has been designated as Europe’s capital of culture for 2015.
The Pompidou pop-up in Maubeuge isn’t the only move France’s national museum of contemporary and modern art is making. As artnet News reported, the museum is plotting an outpost across the Atlantic, in Mexico, that would open in 2016 as part of a year of Franco-Mexican cultural exchange programming.