Vittorio Magnago Lampugnani   Renzo Piano, a disquieting figure in the panorama of contemporary Italian and international architecture, was a protagonist in the wave of technological experimentalism that marked the 1970's. Instigator of the most provocative casperazioni of that t

Jorge Sainz   He has a musical surname and loves sailing, but his real passion is building, or simply - as he likes to say - “gathering materials and assembling them”. He rose to fame hand in hand with Richard Rogers, when they both won the competition for the Cen

Peter Buchanan   Renzo Piano could be categorized as an architect of a culture of tension, though his buildings are not to be strictly temporary, despite their modern materials. Tight tension (as in his early GRP and steel roofs in Genoa, or those of Schlumberger in

Reyner Banham   Of all the buildings designed by Renzo Piano, the one that continues to be most enthusiastically admired is the 1983 IBM traveling exhibition pavilion. Other Piano designs may be better known or more frequently praised, but none has the power to driv

Renzo Piano Building Workshop   France   Many of Renzo Piano's studio's projects are striking for the freshness of their solutions to problems that have traditionally been approached from a strictly disciplinary point of view. In this case, the rehabilitation of an industrial factory has gi

Renzo Piano Building Workshop   United States   Pontus Hulten, director of the National Museum of Modern Art at the Pompidou Center, tells us that Dominique de Menil had been thinking about building a museum for her collection for several years, but could not decide on an architect. Hulten organiz

Renzo Piano Building Workshop   Working for the world's leading computer technology company has always been a challenge that not all architects have been able to meet. Although IBM has never been overly concerned with the architectural design of its buildings (at least not as much

Renzo Piano Building Workshop   Italy   So-called 'landscape offices' can be overwhelming when the only view is of hundreds of people at work, the facade of the neighboring building or the polluted air of the suburbs. But when this typology is applied to almost bucolic locations, and on th

Renzo Piano Building Workshop   Italy   It is not often that the client wants to show with the quality of his building the reliability of the product he manufactures. Renzo Piano has had several of these rare occasions. One of them is precisely this Istituto Sperimentale di Metalli Leggeri

Renzo Piano Building Workshop   Italy   One of the images most admired by Le Corbusier was that photo of the Fiat cars racing along the test track that crowned the Lingotto factory in Turin. This building, similar in size to the other modern giant (the Karl-Marx-Hof in Vienna), has become

Renzo Piano Building Workshop   France   One of the few commissions that the Piano and Rogers studio took as a result of a controversial victory in a Pompidou competition was precisely the headquarters of IRCAM (Institute de Recherche et Cordination Acoustique/Musique). As an ironic counter

Renzo Piano Building Workshop   France   Ever since Kevin Lynch wrote his book The view from the road, and later Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi studied the Las Vegas strip in depth, we have known that from the roads it is not the minutiae of architectural detail that is appreciated,

Renzo Piano Building Workshop   Italy   In the allocation of the new stadiums for the 1990 World Cup in Italy, an architect as passionate about engineering as Piano was a favorite candidate. And, in fact, he got Bari. The capital of Apulia is surrounded by gently rolling hills that form a