The exquisite exhibition of Renzo Piano in London’s Royal Academy was more oriented towards the cognoscente than the layperson. Architects already familiar with the work of the Genoa master enjoyed the sober presentation of sixteen essential buildings on the tables that lined up two of the rooms, over which hung pieces and elements much like skeletons in a museum of natural history, and even more with the colossal wooden island of the central space, where Piano and Shunji Ishida placed same-scale models of the 102 projects – completed or under construction – carried out by the office over half a century. However, the general public had to lament the absence of the large-format photographs that better convey the experience of buildings, explained there with a wealth of documents and fragments of details whose sculptural beauty makes them no less hermetic for non-professionals. In any case, the exhibition was titled ‘The Art of Making Buildings,’ and this it achieves admirably. The architecture of Renzo Piano is based on the art of building, but also on the art of interpreting the needs, the behavior, and the well-being of those who inhabit it...[+]