Soon after the opening of the Pompidou Centre in 1977, Richard Rogers, who died at the weekend aged 88, was standing outside, looking up at the spaghetti tangle of blue pipes that cascade down its facade. A small, elderly woman asked what he thought of the building. “I proudly told her I was the architect,” Rogers later recalled. “She paused, looked at me, and hit me over the head with her umbrella.”

Telling the story in his acceptance speech for the Pritzker Prize, 30 years later, Rogers got a big laugh. The audience knew what the young architect parrying blows on a rain-soaked Paris pavement could not: the deeply controversial arts centre would become one of the city’s most popular attractions, and launch stellar careers for both Rogers and his then partner, Renzo Piano.

At the time, though, the injury just added to a barrage of insults directed at the building throughout its painful six-year gestation. Rogers could remember only one positive newspaper piece in the entire period. Journalists strained to find unflattering comparators: “oil refinery”, “the Loch Ness Monster”, “architectural King Kong”. Under the headline “God, that is ugly!” in the Journal du Dimanche, the sci-fi writer René Barjavel suggested getting rid of the “preposterous shed” by gifting it to Idi Amin. “It was hell,” said Rogers later. “It was the most hated building ever.”

Much of the animus was down to the shocking novelty of the architecture, which shifted the building’s entrails to the outside in order to make open floors within, each the size of two football pitches. There was also fear that this alien interloper – which combined a new home for the Musée d’Art Moderne with a vast public library, a design centre and an institute of contemporary music – would destroy a neighbourhood in the 4th arrondissement.

As the brainchild of conservative president Georges Pompidou, who wanted a new type of cultural institution following the riots that had ripped through the capital in May 1968, the project was also innately political. Rogers himself was reluctant to enter the 1971 design competition, but was persuaded by colleagues including Piano and engineer Ted Happold of Ove Arup & Partners, which collaborated on their proposal.