Piano, Hardcover

The mechanics of lightness: The wide-ranging career of the Italian virtuoso

 “The array of buildings by Renzo Piano is staggering in scope and comprehensive in the diversity of scale, material, and form. He is truly an architect whose sensibilities represent the widest range of this and earlier centuries.” Such was the description of Renzo Piano given by the Pritzker Prize jury citation as they bestowed the prestigious award on him in 1998. Whereas some architects have a signature style, what sets Piano apart is that he seeks simply to apply a coherent set of ideas to new projects in extraordinarily different ways.

“One of the great beauties of architecture is that each time, it is like life starting all over again,” Piano says. “Like a movie director doing a love story, a Western, or a murder mystery, a new world confronts an architect with each project.” This explains why it takes more than a superficial glance to recognize Piano’s fingerprints on such varied projects as the Pompidou Center in Paris, the Kansai Airport in Osaka, Japan, the Tjibaou Cultural Center in Nouméa, New Caledonia, the Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern, Switzerland, the New York Times Building in New York, and The Shard in London, the tallest building in the European Union.