Renzo Piano: The Italian Who Put Pipes on the Outside and Changed How the World Sees Buildings

When the Centre Georges Pompidou opened in Paris in 1977, Parisians were outraged. A building that looked like a colourful oil refinery, right in the heart of the Marais? Pipes on the outside? Escalators in transparent tubes on the facade? The insult! The building was designed by the young Italian architect Renzo Piano (with British partner Richard Rogers), and the outrage lasted about five minutes before the building became the most visited cultural centre in Europe. This is what Renzo Piano does: he makes you see differently. Then you wonder why everything else doesn't look like this.

Piano was born in Genoa in 1937, into a family of builders. His father, grandfather, and uncles were all in construction, and Piano has said that his architecture is fundamentally about craft — the joy of making things with your hands, of understanding materials, of listening to a city before you add something to it. He received the Pritzker Prize (architecture's Nobel) in 1998. His buildings include the Shard in London, the Whitney Museum in New York, and — most movingly — the rebuilt Genoa bridge after the Morandi tragedy. When the bridge that killed 43 people collapsed in his home city, Piano designed its replacement. He returned to give Genoa back its crossing.

Piano works from studios in Paris and Genoa, but his sensibility is unmistakably Italian. He talks about luce (light) the way a painter would — as if it were a material to be shaped and worked. He talks about il luogo (the place) with a reverence that comes from living in a country where every hill, every street, every courtyard is layered with centuries of human meaning. He talks about il respiro della città — the breathing of the city — meaning the way a building must allow the life of the streets to pass through and around it. These are not architectural theories. They are Italian ways of seeing the world.

What distinguishes Piano from many contemporaries is his insistence on belonging to place. His buildings are designed to respond to their specific location — the climate, locally available materials, the social fabric of the neighbourhood. In Paris, the Pompidou turns itself inside out to face the piazza. In New York, the Whitney faces the High Line and the Hudson simultaneously, drawing the city through it. In Genoa, the new Morandi bridge is slender, white, and lit at night like a ship — because Genoa is a port city and its architecture should know it.