Bourges was the very first French town to receive a Maison de la Culture, the cultural centres set up by André Malraux in the 1960s to bring high culture out of Paris. The building opened in 1964 and was the proving ground for a model later copied across the country.
Today the centre, rebadged as MCB° (Maison de la Culture de Bourges), still presents an ambitious programme of theatre, dance and contemporary music. Even if you do not attend a performance, the building — modernist, sober, deliberately understated — is a piece of post-war French cultural history.