Piano designs look to the future
Print Edition
Renzo Piano’s first China show titled “Piece by Piece, Renzo Piano Workshop Building” is ongoing at Power Station of Art until June 28.
His fascination for high-tech, metal and space eventually lead to a bold, vivid and interesting creation — the Pompidou Center in Paris. The building epitomizes Piano’s architectural concept that values both technology and humanity.
His works favor designs of openness with plenty of natural lighting. They focus on the integration of people, architecture and the environment, to maximize each building’s livability and sustainability. His works include museums, opera houses, skyscrapers, commercial buildings and even an airport.
This exhibition is divided into the following sections: beginning with building; lightness in construction; the lightweight, intelligent city; projects in China; places of culture, spaces for art; and architecture for music and silence.
Building models, sketches, illustrations and videos are used to present 27 of the architect’s well-known designs.
Each model, sketch and display functions like a piece of jigsaw, to rebuild the master’s growth and transformation. Through the pieces, Piano’s architectural world starts to become clear and complete. The exhibition explores the relationship between materials, structures, the atmosphere and inhabitants.
The 20th century witnessed phenomenal progress in science and technology. With the era’s theme of “reform,” steel, glass or even aerospace materials were widely used in buildings, boosting a wave of “futurism” across Europe. However, the “mechanical beauty” that allows building materials like steel rods and glass to be freely exposed wasn’t supported by the mainstream, and their dynamic lines and disconnection with the environment were only reminders of the coldness of such mega-structures.
However, Piano didn’t just give up on mechanical beauty; instead, he used it to push his belief in new technology to the extreme.
In 1981, the Renzo Piano Building Workshop was established, and it currently has a staff of 150 with offices in Paris, Genoa and New York.
RPBW’s designs include the Menil Collection in Houston, the terminal for Kansai International Airport in Osaka, the Jean-Marie Tjibaou Cultural Center in New Caledonia, the Morgan Library in New York, the Maison Hermès in Tokyo, the New York Times headquarters, the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, and the Modern Wing of the Art Institute of Chicago.
When accepting the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 1998, Piano said: “I belong to a generation of people who have maintained an experimental approach throughout their life, exploring different fields, ignoring boundaries between disciplines, reshuffling the cards, taking risks and making mistakes.”
Born into a family of builders in Genoa, Italy, Piano graduated from Politecnico University in Milan in 1964. During his studies he worked under the guidance of Franco Albini.
With the integration of architecture and the environment, Piano pioneered his own path within the futurist movement.
The Pritzker Prize’s jury panel once noted about The Pompidou Center that Piano transforms what once had been an elite monument into popular places of social and cultural exchange.”
Recognition of his achievements have included awards such as the RIBA Royal Gold Medal for Architecture in 1989, the UN Goodwill Ambassador in 1994, the Praemium Imperiale in Tokyo in 1995, and the AIA Gold Medal of the American Institute of Architects in 2008.
“It is very difficult to successfully exhibit architecture,” Piano said ahead of the Shanghai exhibition.
“Nothing can really substitute actually being in the building itself, the feeling of the hybrid texture of a city, the continuous stream of voices that make up the sounds of life.
“An architectural exhibition can, however, clearly transmit something of the complex and shared process through which the buildings we design are conceived, constructed and then inhabited. An exhibition can also talk about the range of elements that make up our trade as architects: the tests conducted and progress made, but also our changes of direction and disappointments,” he adds.
“The way in which an exhibition is presented can, by implication, also communicate a style, or language, an expressive intent. For us, this expression is something we call ‘the poetry of lightness,’ of lighting and of movement.”
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