Piano, Renzo (1937)
November 10, 2009 | In: Architectural History
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Ever since his partnership with Richard Rogers and the unveiling of the celebrated Centre Pompidou in Paris (1977), Renzo Piano has been a major figure in contemporary architecture. Born in Genoa, Italy, in 1937, he graduated from the school of architecture of the Milan Polytechnic. While a student, he worked under the design guidance of Franco Albini. Between 1965 and 1970, he met and began a friendship with Jean Prouvé, who had a deep influence on his professional life.
In 1971, with Rogers, he founded the Piano & Rogers agency and in 1977 joined with the engineer Peter Rice in the firm of l’Atelier Piano & Rice. Recently, Piano founded Renzo Piano Workshop with offices in Paris and Genoa. A few of his best known projects include: office building for Olivetti, Naples (1984); Menil Collection Museum, Houston (1986); S. Nicola Football Stadium, Bari (1990); Kensai International Airport Terminal, Osaka (1994); the Debis Building (Headquarters of Daimler Benz), Berlin (1997); Lodi Bank Headquarters, Lodi (1998); and the Aurora Place, high-rise offices and apartment blocks, Sydney (2000).
The winner of the 1998 Pritzker Prize, Piano has received many awards and honors from foundations around the world. He has been widely published in numerous catalogues, articles, and books about his work including the Renzo Piano Building Workshop, Complete Works, Phaidon Press in 1997. One of his most celebrated recent projects is the Cultural Center Jean-Marie Tjibaou, Nouméa, New Caledonia, completed in 1998.
This sketch is an exploration for the Center. Piano has used a narrow, green felt pen to render a section cut through one of the exhibit spaces. The ground plane has been sketched more slowly, showing a heavier, controlled line. Wavy to the left and straighter to the right, it expresses his understanding of the natural site as it transforms into the building. The instrument has given him a bold mark that can be somewhat varied, thick or thin. The trees behind the building and the lattice of the back wall have been treated with similar horizontal strokes showing his concern for integration of the site. The lines of the building and the section cut are substantially heavier than the marks he used for proportioning and dimensioning. These lines are firm and decisive, with little hesitation except for the roof of the pavilion. Here Piano appears to be studying the beginning and ending of the roof and its angle.
This sketch also represents the concept of profile. A profile is an outline of an object but it can also reveal the relationship between inside and outside. This relationship allows architects to comprehend how the building meets the sky and how it meets the ground, and the solid/void relationships between the two. Piano’s section sketch began a dialogue about how far the humans needed to step up into this building and what that meant for the experience of the space. He has included scale figures to further understand the height of the roof and the volume of the space.
The tall, fast strokes may represent Piano’s thinking on the contextual aspects of the project. Since they may have been less defined as architectural elements, he could sketch them in tall, fast gestures. In the project as built, they became structural elements that define space.
