Magical Buildings of Renzo Piano

Genoese architect achieves spectacular results with unique and awe-inspiring constructions

When style is forced to become a trademark, a signature, a personal characteristic, then it also becomes a cage. The effort to be recognizable at any cost, to put your hallmark on things, kills the architect and his or her freedom to develop. The mark of recognition lies in the acceptance of the challenge. And then, yes, it does become identifiable: but by a method, not by a trademark".
The thoughtful speaker is Renzo Piano, the most acclaimed Italian architect of his generation and one of a handful of architects working internationally - along with the likes of Calatrava, Foster, Gehry and Libeskind - who big name clients turn to when seeking architecture that will command world-wide attention.
Despite his words, though, Piano has cemented a reputation for architecture as spectacle since he partnered with British architect Richard Rogers in the early 1970s to create the visually arresting Centre Pompidou in Paris. What has truly set Piano apart from his contemporaries, however, is the 66-year-old Genoese architect's uncanny ability to combine new technologies with an attention to detail at the level of master architects of old. New technologies alone can't cut it, suggests Piano, noting that "innovation in process does not necessarily entail high technology in construction. There is very little today that can bear comparison to the structural and formal research that went into a 15th century church." American architecture critic Herbert Muschamp says Piano "shares with Michelangelo, da Vinci and Brunelleschi the belief that art and science exist within the same cultural continuum."
Piano's father, grandfather, brother and four uncles were all building contractors and the acclaimed architect notes this influence on his main Genoa studio. "We not only design things there, but we also make things and test them. Keeping some of the action together with the conception makes me feel a little less like a traitor to my family". His firm also maintains an office in Paris.
Following his 1964 graduation from the architecture school of Milan Polytechnic, Piano's first major project was the design of the Italian Industry pavilion at the 1970 Expo in Osaka, Japan. The design caught the attention of fellow architect Richard Rogers and the two soon partnered on the design of the Pompidou cultural centre in Paris. The building's high-tech look was intended as parody but not everyone got the joke. Still, the Pompidou has been an immensely popular destination since opening in 1977.
"The objectives change each time," says Piano of his projects, "but they always turn around the need to stir the emotions." He relies heavily on what he calls "the immaterial elements of space," which for the Italian architect include light, transparency, vibration, texture and colour. He also seeks the most appropriate materials for his projects, such as sourcing an Argentinean stone for a museum near Basel, Switzerland.
In a White House ceremony on June 17, 1998, United States President Bill Clinton was in attendance as Piano received the prestigious Pritzker Prize for architecture, an annual award with a list of honourees that reads like a who's who of contemporary master architects. "Deeply imbued with a sense of materials and a craftsman's intuitive feel for what they can do, his architecture embodies a rare humanism," said jury chair J. Carter Brown of the Genoese architect's work. He added that Piano "has proven himself a master of light, and of a wide divergence of building types. Piano is a magician, rooted in the believable."
The practical builder in Piano would disavow the magician label, but his supporters have found much in his work that is praiseworthy. After a well-regarded art museum design in Houston, Texas, Piano designed a football stadium in Bari in the late 1980s that likely would have found favour with one of his heroes, Pierluigi Nervi. The elliptical San Nicola stadium is composed of 26 concrete petals which allow views of the exterior landscape, providing relief from the claustrophobic feel of many stadium designs. Fittingly, Piano has been chosen to renovate two of Nervi's master works built for the 1960 Rome Olympics - the main outdoor stadium for the Games and the indoor Palazzo del Sport.
At about the same time he tackled the football stadium design, Piano created a large-scale shopping centre outside Paris that, based on his client's wishes, required "a degree of effrontery." His firm devised a stainless steel roof which suggested an airship. The suggestion of flight was entirely appropriate for Piano's plan for the massive Kansai International Airport Terminal in Japan. Built on an artificial island in the Bay of Osaka, the terminal building is an undulating form capable of receiving 100, 000 travellers each day. Obviously not one to shy away from ambitious projects, Piano contributed new buildings and warehouse renovations in Genoa during the city's 500th anniversary celebration of the New World achievements of another favourite son, Christopher Columbus. More recently, Piano has been entrusted with a new master plan for the historic Potsdamer Platz district of Berlin.
Piano has not forgotten his native land. Construction of his design for the Citta della Musica for the City of Rome was completed this year. The Flaminia site includes three concert halls and an open-air amphitheatre for 3,000. Each of the acoustically precise halls are externally clad with chameleon-like lead panels. The largest hall seats 2,800 and features a gorgeous ceiling made of American cherry wood. In the Adriatic coastal town of San Giovanni Rotondo, the Genoese architect has created a series of 27 stone arches for the Church of Thanksgiving, a sacred destination able to accommodate up to 8, 000 worshippers. The church was inspired by the life of Padre Pio, a Capuchin friar who was declared a saint last year.
A world away, Piano is heading up the design of the new downtown New York skyscraper headquarters of the venerable New York Times newspaper. Herbert Muschamp, the paper's resident architecture writer, is likely pleased with his employer's selection of the Italian architect. "Piano is a humanist, perhaps the leading exemplar of that tradition in our time," Muschamp wrote last year. The architect "has collapsed the divide between metaphor and material," says the writer, adding that Piano's builder approach is "the most fully modern aspect of Piano's work. It has nothing to do with style but much to do with elegance, in the mathematical as well as the corporeal sense of that term. Seen in the context of his ideas, Piano can give lightness of being even to solid brick walls."
Piano achieves a wonderful dichotomy. His work is substantial in appearance and seemingly inevitable for its chosen sites, yet the architect's buildings have a concurrent lightness and organic form which suggests they could take flight and soar. It is - and always will be - the awe-inspiring achievement of a master magician.

Publication Date: 2003-11-02
Story Location: http://tandemnews.com/viewstory.php?storyid=3303