After Ponte Morandi collapsed on August
14, killing 43 people, the youthful looking octogenarian immediately picked up
his pencils to conceive a new bridge for his beloved hometown city of Genoa
Within two weeks, he had put forward a proposal that recognises the city’s
maritime heritage and in a subtly poetic way also honours the memory of those
who had lost their lives — the shape recalls a ship set on 43 pillars, one for
each victim, with solar powered lights incorporated emitting a pale halo at
night as a permanent memorial.
“When a bridge falls, it falls twice, it
falls physically and it falls symbolically, because a bridge is a symbol of
connection. That’s why the reconstruction is fundamental and I’m trying to do
what I can. My hope is that this moment of construction will become a moment of
pride again,” Piano says.
Though he won the highly prestigious
Pritzker Architecture Prize in 1998 — with the jury comparing him to
Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci — Piano dislikes the portmanteau word
starchitect and often simply refers to himself as a builder. His practice has
long focused on public buildings, in particular cultural ones.
“I love making public buildings because
they are for people to gather and stay together… the art of building meets the
art of building for people,” he says noting the idea architecture can change
the world is misguided “architecture doesn’t change the world, the world
changes by itself, by big shifts, but architecture is celebrating these changes,
in fact giving shapes to these changes, and those buildings in some ways
represent that; they represent a change in society that became a building.”
Piano has often said he sees
architecture as much more than building, to him it combines poetry, beauty,
community, humanism; architecture is “the art of answering needs, as well as
the art of answering desires.”
Born in Genoa to a family of builders,
Piano remembers growing up either looking at the sea or sitting on a building
site. These early experiences had a profound influence on the architect, instilling
a fascination with light, a love of beauty and nature, and a thirst for
adventure and discovery.
He has compared some of his buildings to
“flying vessels,” wanting to elevate them from the ground and create space
beneath where people can congregate and his design have also often sought to
“sculpt light,” be it finding innovative methods to diffuse natural light over
an art collection (the Menil Collection in Houston) or angling a roof so a new
building does not cast a shadow over a city park (the Aurora Place in Sydney).
A defining idea
In 1971, Piano and his then partner
Richard Rogers beat 681 other bids with their audacious proposal for the Centre
Pompidou. Their revolutionary inside-out concept — with a hint of nautical
influences — created a novel space configuration for a museum that aimed to
democratize the museum-going experience, breaking down the monumental and
intimidating designs that had up until then been standard features associated
with museums to create a completely open space, accessible to all. Piano admits
with a laugh that the project was “completely mad, like a spaceship had landed
in the middle of Paris.”
Although highly controversial at the
time, it positively changed the relationship between a cultural building and
the public thanks in part to the piazza set outside, while the interior was
free of columns making it more adaptable. “It was about creating a new public
space, and saying that culture was not just that which took place within the
building, but about people and the life outside,” says Goodwin, “The whole idea
of stripping out the inside and putting all the services on the outside was
about expressing how buildings work as well as freeing the space inside.”
“I think that’s something that’s very
interesting about Renzo’s work. There was something that was so of its moment,
but also so forward thinking, provocative, talking about culture, but also
disturbing Paris in some ways, and you get this with a lot of his buildings and
as they start to become used they become loved and better understood. And this
is a recurring theme, how he put something into a place that is slightly
unsettling in a very positive way. The best architecture turns something in
your mind and invites you to think about the place itself and what it’s doing.”
After the Pompidou was completed in
1977, Piano and Rogers went their separate ways. Piano worked for a few years
on experimental project before setting up the Renzo Piano Building Workshop,
which now has offices in Paris, New York and Genoa. Over the years, some of the
workshop’s most notable projects have included the 52-storey New York Times
Building in New York, The Shard in London and the new Whitney Museum of
American Art in New York.
Having just surveyed the exhibition at the
Royal Academy, Piano mused: “It’s madness what you can do in life when you
never stop.”
FIRST PUBLISHED IN PRESTIGE MAGAZINE (DECEMBER)
FIRST PUBLISHED IN PRESTIGE MAGAZINE (DECEMBER)