Appearing under the pseudonym Gustave Affeulpin in 1976, and coinciding with the inauguration of the Centre Beaubourg in Paris, Albert Meister’s fictional text La soi-disant utopie du centre Beaubourg imagines a radical libertarian space submerged beneath the newly erected center-piece of French Culture. In a world turned upside down, the seventy-six storeys submerged beneath the official centre for culture provide a platform for alternative modes of work and creation. Reporting, in sometimes humorous, sometimes more poetic language, and with tongue firmly in cheek, the narrator recounts the vacillations of free organisation in a satire that never takes its eye off the main target: state-sponsored culture. This is the first translation and publication of La soi-disant utopie du centre Beaubourg in English, a project that I have undertaken as an attempt to both revitalise a significant cultural treatise incorporating many elements of Meister’s sociological thinking and to reflect upon my subjective role of the artist in transferring ideas from one cultural framework and era to another.