Close to turning seventy, Renzo Piano sails the world’s seas with the courage of a lone sailor. After building on four continents, the Genoese keeps on facing each journey as one of discovery, in which the skillful use of rigging, the mastery in read
Few buildings excite contemporary sensibilities as deeply as does the J M Tjibaou Cultural Centre outside Nouméa, New Caledonia by the Renzo Piano Building Workshop (RPBW). It is clearly a building of our times, the product of up to the minute comput
Kenneth Frampton: Recently, I gave a talk at Yale in which I expressed a certain skepticism about parametric design when it’s used to generate a form, as opposed to digital processing when it’s employed to evolve an overall project. I wonder if you w
The result of an international competition, the construction of Kansai Airport, carried out in 38 months by 6,000 workers, meant a huge challenge. It had to be raised on an artificial island (that existed only on paper during the first stages of the
During the process of negotiations for the independence of the French territory of New Caledonia, and per its request, the government of the metropolis took on the commitment of building in Nouméa a center in the memory of the political leader Jean M
The church is intended to serve the everincreasing number of pilgrims flocking to the visit the place where Padre Pio, a Capuchin friar famous for his stigmata, used to live. San Giovanni Rotondo has become one of the most important pilgrimage destin
This museum goes up on the outskirts of the city of Basel, and is a work promoted by the art dealer and collector Ernst Beyeler, who wanted to raise a building for his extensive collection, thereby making it accessible to the general public. Beyeler
This project is a multipurpose complex devoted to music that further enriches the city’s vast cultural heritage. Made up of three ‘music boxes’ of different capacities (2,800, 1,200 and 700 seats) and features, which seem to hover over the surroundin
To celebrate the Olympic Games in Sydney in the year 2000, an Australian company commissioned and initiated the construction of a complex that comprises two buildings: an office tower and a residential building of lower height right beside it. At fir
The French Group Hermès chose the dense district of Ginza, in the heart of Tokyo, for its main headquarters in Asia, a building of 6,000 square meters devoted to shopping space, workshops, offices, exhibition, and multimedia areas, and topping it all
Owner of one of the world’s largest private sculpture collections, the Texas entrepreneur Ray Nasher rejected the proposals of several institutions to exhibit his works and decided to build his own museum. Located in the center of the city of Dallas,
Not very far from the cemetery where Paul Klee is buried and just a few kilometers from the city of Bern, this museum has been designed as a tribute to the Swiss artist and to his oeuvre. Surrounded by a landscape of gently rolling hills and with the
The department store chain Peek & Cloppenburg began its activity in 1901, writing a story of successes that has allowed it to overcome many obstacles, such as the huge impact caused by World War II both for the German economy and for the company itse
Taking the building designed by Richard Meier as point of departure, this project entails the extension of its facilities to adapt them to the significant growth of the institution. Founded in 1905 under the name Atlanta Art Association, the High Mus
Both a museum and a library, the Morgan Library is the New York home of the financier J. P. Morgan’s collection, one of the world’s biggest and finest of Medieval and Renaissance manuscripts, books, prints and drawings. Installed in a building design
This tower, of 70 floors, is located in Southwark, next to London Bridge Station, after which it is named. The building will be 306 meters tall with a total floor area of 90,000 square meters. Its interior will accommodate a program consisting of off
Founded in 1851, The New York Times is one of the leading newspapers in the United States. In the year 2000 the daily launched an architecture competition for the design of its new headquarters, to be built on a site not very far from its current loc
The Art Institute of Chicago consists of two wings connected by a bridge-building that goes up over railway tracks. The need to extend the facilities to house new uses and improve overall performance encouraged to add another wing to the existing mus
The New Academy goes up on the same site of the former California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. The design required the demolition of eleven existing structures, built between 1916 and 1991, damaged during the earthquake of
This project undertakes the restructuring of a scattered architectural heritage, with an extension that seeks to seamlessly blend the old and the new. To preserve the existing buildings and their architectural peculiarities, the extension plan includ
The campus of Columbia University is located on Morningside Heights, next to Harlem. It is a very symbolic place of New York that is now looking for a cultural and social renaissance after a long parenthesis of crime and violence. For the university,
Luis Fernández-Galiano
Un navegante solitario A Lone Sailor
Peter Buchanan
El artesano moderno The Modern Craftsman
Un periplo oceánico
An Ocean Journey
Aeropuerto de Kansai, 1988-1994, Osaka (Japón)
Kansai International Airport Terminal, 1988-1994, Osaka (Japan)
Centro Cultural Jean Marie Tjibaou, 1991-1998, Nouméa (Nueva Caledonia)
Jean Marie Tjibaou Cultural Center, 1991-1998, Nouméa (New Caledonia)
Iglesia de peregrinación Padre Pío, 1991-2004, San Giovanni Rotondo (Italia)
Padre Pio Pilgrimage Church, 1991-2004, San Giovanni Rotondo (Italy)
Museo de la Fundación Beyeler, 1992-1997, Riehen (Suiza)
Beyeler Foundation Museum, 1992-1997, Riehen (Switzerland)
Auditorio Parco della Musica, 1994-2002, Roma (Italia)
Parco della Musica Auditorium, 1994-2002, Rome (Italy)
Oficinas y viviendas Aurora Place, 1996-2000, Sidney (Australia)
Aurora Place Office Tower and Residential Building, 1996-2000, Sydney (Australia)
Maison Hermès, 1998-2001, Tokio (Japón)
Maison Hermès, 1998-2001, Tokyo (Japan)
Centro de Escultura Nasher, 1999-2003, Dallas (Estados Unidos)
Nasher Sculpture Center, 1999-2003, Dallas (United States)
Zentrum Paul Klee, 1999-2005, Berna (Suiza)
Zentrum Paul Klee, 1999-2005, Bern (Switzerland)
Centro comercial Peek & Cloppenburg, 1999-2005, Colonia (Alemania)
Peek & Cloppenburg Department Store, 1999-2005, Cologne (Germany)
Ampliación del High Museum of Art, 1999-2005, Atlanta (Estados Unidos)
High Museum of Art Expansion, 1999-2005, Atlanta (United States)
Ampliación de la Biblioteca Morgan, 2000-2006, Nueva York (Estados Unidos)
Morgan Library Expansion, 2000-2006, New York (United States)
Proyectos de habla inglesa
English-speaking Projects
Torre London Bridge, 2000-2010, Londres (Reino Unido)
London Bridge Tower, 2000-2010, London (United Kingdom)
Edificio New York Times, 2000-2007, Nueva York (Estados Unidos)
The New York Times Building, 2000-2007, New York (United States)
Ampliación del Instituto de Arte de Chicago, 1999-2009, Chicago (Estados Unidos)
Art Institute of Chicago Expansion, 1999-2009, Chicago (United States)
Nueva sede de la Academia de Ciencias, 2000-2008, San Francisco (Estados Unidos)
New California Academy of Sciences, 2000-2008, San Francisco (United States)
Ampliación del LACMA, 2003-2007, Los Ángeles (Estados Unidos)
LACMA Expansion, 2003-2007, Los Angeles (United States)
Nuevo campus de la Universidad de Columbia, 2002, Nueva York (Estados Unidos)
Columbia University Campus Plan, 2002, New York (United States)
Kenneth Frampton
Un diálogo en Nueva York A Dialogue in New York
Luis Fernández-Galiano
Close to turning seventy, Renzo Piano sails the world’s seas with the courage of a lone sailor. After building on four continents, the Genoese keeps on facing each journey as one of discovery, in which the skillful use of rigging, the mastery in reading the winds and the steadiness in the course do not exclude surprising finds. In the almost domestic and artisanal atmosphere of the Building Workshop of Punta Nave, overlooking the sea of Liguria, the boat captain and his team study the tools at hand, the environmental conditions and the purpose of the trip, but this unique combination of technique, context and program suggests only which direction to take, and the final itinerary is decided en route, turning each journey and every project into a genuine exercise of inventiveness and risk.
While the architect’s concern for articulation and assembly comes from his background as a builder and carpenter, the pursuit of innovation and experiment is a result of the agitated context of his younger years and the engineering flavor of his first references, from the close Prouvé or the faraway Fuller to the fraternal collaboration with Peter Rice. In the end, each building is an idea and a detail: even if the projects are grouped by family, or their sequence reveals genealogical lines, each work has a recognizable profile, summed up in a luminous concept and an element of exquisite design. The happy machine of the Pompidou is abridged in the muscular gerberettes as the laconic Beyeler in the delicate leaves of the roof or the silent extension of Atlanta in the skylight peaks.
This magazine published its first monograph on a contemporary author in 1990 – until then only issues devoted to Mies and Le Corbusier, coinciding with their centenaries, had appeared – and Piano was chosen for this maiden issue, which reviewed his career since the foundation of the Building Workshop in 1981: a career that, after the initial echoes of Piano’s association with Richard Rogers and the impact of their Paris museum, started with his relationship with Dominique de Menil and the extraordinary work of Houston, and went up to the completion of the Bari stadium, the most beautiful of those built for the World Cup held in Italy the year of the monograph, which ended with the project for Kansai airport, a colossal commission won in competition by Piano a few months earlier.
Sixteen years later, AV resumes the chronicle of the Genoese master’s exploration journey, and the logbook starts necessarily on the Japanese coast with the heroic curves of the airport, continues with the monumental huts of the Southern Seas and the full blown sails that greet the Utzon of Sydney, and wraps up a detailed tour through Europe to finally land in America, where – in the wake of the success of the Menil and the 1998 Pritzker Prize – he is now completing an extraordinary series of constructive and spatial finds: from the return to Texas in 1999 to collaborate with another exceptional client, Raymond Nasher, and up to the colonization of the cultural territory that extends between the Atlantic and the Pacific with a network of exact precincts that testify to the singular fortune of this oceanic adventure.
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