Renzo Piano – Leading Italian architect and designer concerned with technological innovations and environmentally balanced buildings. From 1959 to 1964 Piano studied at the Milan Politecnico, where he subsequently taught until 1968. In 1970 he set up in partnership with the English architect Richard Rogers and undertook a number of commissions in Italy and England, including the PATScentre in Cambridge in 1975.

The practice’s most important work, however, was its winning entry for the Place Beaubourg competition for a national arts centre in the middle of Paris, organized by the French government in 1973 (the Pompidou Centre). The imposing six-storey design takes the metaphor of “cultural machine” to its technological extreme by placing the structural skeleton and colour-coded servicing elements on the outside of the building.

Piano’s use of technological function as a point of departure characterizes the work of what has become known as the “High-Tech” group of famous architects. This movement includes English designers such as Norman Foster, Nicholas Grimshaw and Michael Hopkins. However, Piano’s desire to achieve a particular aesthetic quality is tempered by a concern for accommodating the user’s needs.

In his later work Piano has continued the structural experiments of the Pompidou Centre, applying them to a range of social and civic projects such as the residential quarter at Corciano in Perugia, the museum building for the De Menil Collection in Houston, Texas, and, most recently, a new football stadium in Bari, S Italy, built for the 1990 World Cup. The Stadio Nuovo continues Piano’s fruitful collaboration with the English engineer Peter Rice of Ove Arup and Partners.

List of Piano’s major works:

• Centre Beaubourg, Paris (with Richard Rogers and Peter Rice), Paris, 1973-7.
• PATScentre Research Laboratories and Workshops, Cambridge, England (with Richard Rogers), 1975.
• Experimental residential quarter, Corciano, Perugia (with Peter Rice), 1978-82.
• Museum for the De Mend Collection, Houston, ‘Eexas, 1981.
• Stadio Nuovo, Bari (with Peter Rice), 1990.

Bibliography

• “Renzo Piano”, Architecture d’Aujourd’hui, Feb. 1982.
• Dino Massimo, Renzo Piano: progetti e arcbitettnra 1964-1953, Paris and Milan, 1983.
• Paul Goldberger (intro.), Renzi, Piano: Buildings and Protects 1971.1989, New York, 1989.