Who is Renzo Piano?
Renzo Piano was born in the port city of Genoa, Italy on September 14, 1937. He graduated from the school of Architecture of the Milan Polytechnic. His father was a builder and this influenced him significantly, both because he was exposed to construction at an early age and because the craft behind architecture remained very much engrained in him as an architect. In 1971, he set up the Piano & Rogers agency, with Richard Rogers, his partner on the Centre Pompidou in Paris. In 1977, he founded L’Atelier Piano and Rice with engineer Peter Rice, who would work with him on many projects until his death in 1992. He then founded the Renzo Piano Building Workshop with offices in Paris and Genoa. Some 100 architects, engineers and other professionals work with him. In 1990, he received the Kyoto Prize and eight years later the coveted Pritzker Architecture Prize.
“Depending on your point of view,” says Slate, “Piano is either the most corporate avant-garde architect in the world or the most avant-garde corporate one.” California Academy of Sciences executive director Patrick Kociolek leans toward the latter, indulging in a little hero worship: “Most of the architects we interviewed arrived with minions and models and fully developed ideas of what they thought our building, and the Academy, should be. But one architect, Renzo Piano, stood out. Piano came by himself, with only a sketchpad and a green felt-tip pen. Instead of explaining his design for the new Academy, Piano simply asked what the Academy’s ethic was. … We immediately knew Piano was our architect.” Epic.
