Renzo Piano
Piano designed the Centre Pompidou with Richard Rogers and has since built museums, concert halls and skyscrapers all over the world, such as The Shard in London. His buildings are characterised by precision and light.
Renzo Piano was born in 1937 in Genoa into a family of builders; his father, uncles and brother worked in construction. He studied architecture in Florence and at the Politecnico di Milano, graduating in 1964. During his studies and the years that followed he worked in his father’s building firm and experimented with lightweight structures in plastic and steel. He also worked for a time with Louis Kahn in Philadelphia and with the engineer Zygmunt Stanisław Makowski in London. He began working with Richard Rogers in 1971, and together they won the competition for the Centre Pompidou in Paris. He collaborated for many years with the engineer Peter Rice and in 1981 founded the Renzo Piano Building Workshop.
The Centre Pompidou, opened in 1977, made Piano world-famous. He went on to develop an architecture marked by care for detail and daylight. The Menil Collection in Houston, 1987, has a roof of concrete leaves that filter the light, as does the Fondation Beyeler near Basel. Kansai Airport in Osaka was built on an artificial island, and the Tjibaou Cultural Centre in New Caledonia draws on traditional hut forms. He led the reconstruction of Potsdamer Platz in Berlin and designed the Parco della Musica music complex in Rome, the California Academy of Sciences with its green roof, and The Shard skyscraper in London. His buildings are characterised by precision, industrially manufactured components, lightness and light.
Piano received the Pritzker Prize in 1998 and in 2013 was appointed a senator for life in Italy. He has continued to work on major commissions and social projects, including the renewal of suburbs in Italian cities and the new San Giorgio motorway bridge in Genoa, which replaced the bridge that collapsed in 2018. He is regarded as one of the foremost museum architects of our time. In the Nordic countries he designed the Astrup Fearnley Museum at Tjuvholmen in Oslo, opened in 2012, with a sweeping glass roof over timber-clad buildings. His buildings have shaped ideas about how museums can make use of daylight and how high-tech construction can be combined with sensuality, craftsmanship and care for the site.