Who is Renzo Piano?
Renzo Piano is an Italian architect, born on 14 September 1937 in Genoa. He made his name with the Centre Pompidou in Paris, designed with Richard Rogers, and received the Pritzker Prize, architecture’s leading international award, in 1998. In the UK he is best known for The Shard at London Bridge.
Background
Piano comes from a family of builders. He graduated in architecture from the Politecnico di Milano in 1964 and went on to work with, among others, Louis Kahn in Philadelphia. After his partnership with Rogers ended he set up his own practice, the Renzo Piano Building Workshop. In 2013 he was appointed a senator for life in Italy.
Key works
| Building | Location | Year |
|---|---|---|
| Centre Pompidou (with Richard Rogers and Gianfranco Franchini) | Paris | 1971-1977 |
| Menil Collection | Houston | 1987 |
| Kansai International Airport terminal | Osaka | 1994 |
| NEMO (opened as NewMetropolis) | Amsterdam | 1997 |
| Jean-Marie Tjibaou Cultural Centre | Nouméa, New Caledonia | 1998 |
| The Shard | London | 2012 |
| Whitney Museum of American Art | New York | 2015 |
NEMO, the science museum in Amsterdam, is shaped like a ship’s bow and sits over the southern entrance of the IJ tunnel. Its sloping roof is a public stepped terrace with views over the old city.
Lessons for builders and designers
- Expose structure and services, and detail them well. At the Centre Pompidou the structure and building services are on the outside, which made it a landmark of high-tech architecture. Visible services mean every duct and bracket becomes part of the design, so workmanship and coordination matter more, not less.
- Design with daylight. In museums such as the Menil Collection the roof is shaped to let filtered daylight into the galleries.
- Think in components. Carefully developed, repeated elements can give a building its character. The Pritzker jury praised his work as a rare melding of art, architecture and engineering.
If you want to see his work up close in the UK, The Shard is the obvious place; in the Netherlands, NEMO’s roof terrace is open to the public.
Related terms
- Architect
- Architecture
- High-tech architecture
- Glass in architecture
- Renovation
- Architectural rendering
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